r/MedicalAssistant

Let me get this straight:

You want an experienced individual with 1-2 years experience already as an MA who also has completed a NHA accredited CCMA program that averages anywhere between $900-$3,000 to work full time as a dirty-work, catch-all employee and you also want to pay them $16-$19 an hour with no room for career growth opportunities.

I can’t think of a word to describe how ridiculous and quite frankly, pathetic even requesting something like that is let alone expecting it.

If someone knows something I don’t, I beg you to enlighten me as this is 99.8% of the requests I see.

I’m on the $200+ Max 20x plan and I’m fucking furious.

For weeks I was getting normal usage: 4-6 normal prompts in non-peak hours would hit around 10% of my 5-hour session. After their April 23 “we fixed everything and reset limits” announcement, the same exact workflow on Opus 4.6 now makes one single prompt eat 7-8% (sometimes more) of the session. The weekly bar moves as expected, but the session drains way faster. This is a blatant reduction in value halfway through my paid month.

I opened a ticket in the Get Help section. Here’s the level of bullshit I’ve been dealing with for days:

• They blame “adaptive thinking”, tokenizer changes, context window, message complexity — everything except their own changes.
• They keep admitting the behavior changed but say they “don’t have access” to any details.
• I asked how to reach a real human → they literally told me to go to “Get Help” section… while I was already talking to them inside it.
• Last reply: “I’m not able to escalate or transfer you to a human agent.”

This is not customer support. This is a fucking loop designed to wear you down. They’re running A/B tests on different users so the outrage never hits all at once, quietly stealing value from people who already paid for the month, then hiding behind “Terms of Service allow us to change things”.

If you’re on Max 20x or any higher plan and your session suddenly got much worse after late April, you’re not crazy. They’re doing this on purpose.

I’m done being polite. This feels like straight-up fraud. Paying $200+ a month for a service that gets quietly nerfed mid-cycle while their support is 100% useless bots is unacceptable.

Who else is getting screwed like this? Drop your experiences below. Maybe if enough of us speak up they’ll stop treating paying customers like idiots.

I took the exam today, and it was easy to me, almost too easy. It was absolutely nothing like the practice tests, nothing about administering vaccines, a few things about blood draws and a few things about EKGS that I know for a fact I got wrong except one because I study that same one for like 3 days 🤣 with that being said, me thinking it was easy is a sign I failed it. Especially seeing so many people say they failed it really makes me think I did too. A lot of it is common sense as well. I guessed my best answers on some of them aka the ekg ones. Has anyone else felt this way?

Also to add: my job gave me and another 3 months - march to may 31st to take a year long course, study, and pass the test. No other options. So if I don’t pass, I’m blaming it on that because I felt so rushed.

I passed my CCMA NHA exam yesterday and I just wanted to share some tips! I did my program through Stepful, so if anyone would like an honest review on the program let me know! Honestly I feel like the practice tests on Mango Study and Smarter Ma were so much harder than the actual test, BUT I will say I had multiple questions from smarter ma and Mango study on my actual test! I was extremely shocked but super grateful to see that it paid off! I studied for almost a month and I made sure to study for at LEAST an hour and a half a day, and never after 10pm. If i got tired before 10pm I stopped studying, because you will not truly register information when sleepy. I stayed prayed up and reliable on my studying! I was super anxious, but truly if you stay consistent with studying I feel the test is pretty easy! I only used Smarter Ma, Mango study and Pass Ma with Dani on youtube to study!
My Smarter Ma has five days left and my Mango study has 2 weeks left if anyone would like to use the remaining time let me know! Again the practice tests were definitely harder than the real one, so the pass predictors on the sites and the study materials are definitely reliable!

I passed my exam yesterday and I’m so excited! It was through NHA and I passed with a 424.

Trying to decide between 2 MA jobs as a pre-PA student:

1. Pediatric/Allergy MA in Manhattan (Upper West Side) — $23/hr, but ~1 hour train commute each way
2. Dermatology MA — $19/hr, only a 5 minute walk from my house

I’m mainly looking for good clinical experience, work-life balance, and something that will help me long-term for PA school. Both are full-time and I’m torn between higher pay/specialty interest vs convenience/quality of life. Which would you pick and why?

I am bawling my eyes out while writing this so if there’s any misspellings, I apologize because I can barely see right now I just got off of my internship and my coordinator called me telling me that my clinic was letting me go during my internship because I yawned in front of a patient. Yes you read that right I yawned. I am in tears right now and I can’t fathom what I’ve just been told. I don’t understand. I showed up early every day. I constantly asked what they needed me to do. I took initiative. I scheduled patient I scheduled appointments and when there’s nothing to do I constantly ask what do you guys need me to do? I’ll do anything. I just really don’t understand. I was at the top of my class in my medical assistant program. I know my EKGs I do my injections correctly, but it’s like ever since I arrived at the clinic. I just felt like nobody liked me there. I had mispronounced a medication and the doctor called me a fucking idiot. I feel like my dreams and the medical field have been shambled. The whole reason I do the medical assistant program was because I want to do nursing and I’m supposed to start my prerequisites this fall but now I just feel so discouraged and I have two other friends in the medical assistant program that have told me they’ve had similar experiences of the other MAs being mean to them and the doctor verbally abusing them when I was on the phone with my coordinator I had asked her don’t you think it’s ridiculous that they’re letting me go because I yawned in front of a patient and she said yes it is but I can’t make them keep you. I don’t know what to do. Can anybody tell me if I’m in the wrong and I should’ve kept my yawn in or if they’ve had any similar experiences, please.. I don’t know what to do. Even my coordinator told me that she was shocked that they’re letting me go because of that reason.

I’ve been working as a virtual patient coordinator for almost 7 years now. i’ve mastered the art of patient care with the companies and clinics i’ve worked with (hellorache, golean, etc). it was very natural for me to keep my tone warm, polite, and would always adjust my pace depending on the patient. i even get reviews, tons of it, saying it’s a pleasure talking to me. honestly, i believed i was really good at this.

but yesterday was the first time i got hit with insults that went way below the belt. a prospect new patient told me: “i don’t care how you’re going to make it possible, but it’s your job, and you are paid, so make every dollar count, and if not for patients like me, your family will go hungry.”

i was shaken... literally blank stare on my monitor for couple secs until my clinic manager had to step in, and i offered to transfer the call. less than 5 minutes later, another call came in.... it was the same patient, angrier than before, overflowing with hateful words, even wishing me and my family dead. my manager intervened again and told me to step away from the phones to breathe. that’s when i broke down, I was sobbing like a child.

i’ve been yelled at before, sure. but never this much hate from someone i barely know, someone i was being nothing but polite and warm to. i can’t believe there are people like that… especially considering this was just about an appointment for dental prophylaxis. it’s not like a life‑or‑death situation that should make someone that frustrated.

good thing my manager was there, and i guess i’ve matured enough to recover. but to be honest, for a minute i felt like the lowest life form that ever existed.

What are the best studying tips for medical school? I am in high school right now, and even though I have good grades, I feel like it takes me a really long time to study because I study everything very thoroughly. Right now it works because of the lower course load, but I’m worried about the future. It also takes me a while to get tough concepts down, but once I get them its usually really easy to succeed. Please let me know the best studying tips (:

I’m 32 years old and I want to get into health care. I’ve always been interested in becoming a medical assistant but never had the means to do so. I’m in a place where I’m able to go back to school, and am heavily considering a medical assistant program. How old were yall when you started? Any regrets? Thank you!

So I had my first day as a hired CCMA this past week and it was awful. Got placed at an urgent care and immediately regretted my life choices.

They started off with informing me that I would need to buy my own stethoscope (got one), my own bp cuff, my own pulse ox, and my own laptop to use for their EHR/EMR. I spoke to other MA’s including a family member who have been in this field longer, everyone else is shocked by this. When I was externing at the other site with this same urgent care group, they provided all supplies needed to do the job. My family member also told me her urgent care job provided her a company bought laptop.

The manager and her assistant manager told me in the beginning of the shift that they understood I have 0 experience with the EHR system and that they don’t expect speed or perfection from me. That they fully expected me to need help and told me I won’t get it in just one day. An hour later they were both upset with me for not getting it all down by then. I’ve never worked with one of these systems before, I’ve only ever shadowed and taken vitals, never actually directly worked on the computer and I told them that the day I was interviewed, hired and the first day when they asked. They were fully aware of my inexperience yet expected me to be fully experienced and adjusted after one hour of teaching.

And this is how the manager taught me: “click here, and here, add this here, here here here, and here and you’re done.” She was so speedy with her “training” that I couldn’t keep up. I asked her to slow down and she would go faster. Then whenever I asked for help or clarification she would roll her eyes and ignore me.

She pulled her assistant to the side, still in earshot of me, the front desk and a patient checking in, then loudly said, “this new hire sucks. She’s too slow.”

So I tried to go faster but then I started missing steps and when I’d ask for her to check and show me what I missed she would just take over the chart and add it all without saying anything then berate me for not knowing how to do something.

It was awful.

I get that they are understaffed and busy but they knew they would be training a new MA and they were so unprepared for that. That’s on them, not me. I tried to take in as much information as I could but that was too much too quickly with too much pressure being added.

Worst was when their HR team pulled me in they tried to pressure me to clock out and shadow and be trained unpaid which is ridiculous. I ended up crying in front of four people in the HR office.

Ultimately I’ve decided to quit.

I honestly don’t know if I want to be an MA anymore if that’s how jobs are going to be. My family member told me her previous job gave her an orientation and a 6 week training course which this site clearly never intended to give. I can’t seem to get hired anywhere because I have 0 experience. Same issue happened with phlebotomy, couldn’t get hired anywhere without experience.

I love medicine, I love helping people, I love a good challenge and learning new things but this was a big wake up call for me.

May just take a break and be something else somewhere else until later.

I just needed a place vent.

Y'all,, I've been reading the posts on here for the past couple of days. Some people say getting experience as an MA is not worth it at all and others say it is. I go to a community college, recently I changed my major from MA to Radiology. I decided to still get certified as an MA and then continue my studies to graduate with an associates in Radiology and become a RadTech. Now, I'm scheduled to start my MA program in August and I'm worried about wasting time. My primary concern right now is the pay aspect of MAs, is it possible to make a livable wage? I'm 23, I still live with my parents and as we have all probably been experiencing, it's becoming increasingly expensive to live. My parents are older, yet they still work and my siblings are too young to make enough to cooperate money wise in the house. I'd like to get certified as an MA asap just in case anything happens then I'm not left without anything,, I did start school late and I feel like I'm running out of time. As I said, I worry that I'm currently wasting time. Should I just drop the idea of getting certified as an MA and instead use these next 6 months to complete my classes and RadTech program?

This sub is full of so many negative experiences, I'm wondering if anyone has any GOOD things to say about their choice to get into and their role in Medical Assisting?

(new MA student here)

So I have an MBA from a no name school and had been working in admin roles for several years. I got DOGE’d in 2025 and had been struggling to land roles. I worked at a liquor store for close to a year and a few months and I was constantly hustling for work in my field.

I found a job as a SAP user for a logistics firm and I realized again how viscerally I hate the white collar lifestyle. The pay isn’t great, but it’s fine, but the cliquishness of the org, misleading responsibilities and emphasis during the interview process, and the sheer crushing meaningless of learning SAP has left me miserable. I can’t sleep, eat, and I dread every day of going to work. I miss my liquor store job but the commute is too much (hence why I don’t want to return)

I’ve been interested in retraining into the medical field and it would seem that MA could be a good fit and they got relative quick workforce retraining a at NVCC or Montgomery college.

My question is

1. What is the state of hiring for Medical Assistants
2. What are the up-skilling options for medical assistants
3. What is the quality of life like

I know I’d be taking a pay cut. I’m fortunate in that my house is paid off and have significant savings, which makes me fortunate in this market. I’m trying to have a quality of life move, a job that actually helps people, leverages my precious white collar experience, and hopefully allows me to grow towards PA or Allied Health careers. Does this make sense or are there drawbacks.

Thanks Reddit!