When the challenges facing the medical industry come up, one doesn't normally think of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. But he illustrated a stark reality awaiting would-be doctors when he testified beforeCongress that his son ison pace to graduate from medical school with a whopping $400,000 in loans.

Bernanke's son isn't unusual. The median education debt for 2012 medical school graduates was $170,000 in 2012, compared with $13,469 in 1978, according to Bloomberg, which adds that in today's dollars, the 1978 amount would be $48,000.

The huge cost -- and resulting debt -- of medical school may be dissuading some students from enrolling, the story says. That's coming at a sensitive time for America's health care industry, which is facing a shortage of doctors just as an aging population needs them most.

With the average four-year cost of medical school amounting to $278,455 for private schools and $207,868 for public universities, some lower-income students in particular may find the expense daunting.

"You probably are pricing out a whole segment of lower-income kids that have the ability and the intellect to succeed," Ami Bera, a California congressman and a physician, told Bloomberg. He said he left medical school in 1991 with less than $10,000 in loans.

Most medical students finance their studies with loans, given that very few full scholarships are available and grants usually pay for only a portion of the cost. But those loans don't come cheap, with graduate students paying as much as 7.9% on federal loans, far higher than the U.S. 10-year Treasury note's 1.78%, Bloomberg points out.

The country is facing a shortage of 90,000 doctors in 10 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Some specialties, such as urology and thoracic surgery, will see a decrease of physicians, while the number of Americans over the age of 65 is projected to grow by one-third, the group says. On top of that, doctors themselves are getting older, with one-third projected to retire in the next decade.

The reasons behind the surging tuition might be simply the rising cost of maintaining a functioning hospital, according to the 2x2 Project, a site that's sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

But the prices that hospitals and other health care centers charge are outrageous, with X-rays and drug injections subjected to huge markups, according to a Time magazine report by Steven Brill that was highlighted by my colleague Kim Peterson.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (PFE) are spending less money on wooing doctors, a practice that's come under fire for driving up the costs of drugs, as my colleague Jonathan Berr wrote on Friday.

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Medical school costs soaring