| mrstickball said: 1. Despite said countries having universal healthcare, it shouldn't be a ringing endorsement to assume that if such measures were taken in the US that cost curves would bend significantly in the same manner. I could offer our education system as a prime example. We have full socialization of the system, with 90% of students being enrolled in government schools. Despite that, our costs are far higher than European schools, and provide far worse scores and graduation rates than Europe.
In the case of healthcare, I could point to both Medicare and the Veterans Administration as proofs that government involvement in our health care system doesn't provide cheaper or more better health care. Rather, both cost significantly more than private care among any and all metrics with Medicare enrollees costing about 60% more than private enrollees, and VA recipients being about 80% more than private enrollees. The VA is a great example - they do all care in-house for their patients, therefore there is little to no billing. Despite that, their costs are higher, not lower, than private plans. Additionally, the data you presented doesn't take into consideration the fact that there are other significant influencers on the cost of care in America that aren't presented nor discussed in your data sets, such as obesity.
2. Go look at the rate of enrollment in schools via federally-funded tutions. Look at the laws surrounding college tuitions as of late. The reason cost is increasing so much is that the government is incentivizing higher education and increasing the costs assosicated with college. You argue that costs don't increase much if a student goes to college for 2 weeks and drops out, but that is not the problem. The problem is what we face today - that many men and women get major loans for 4 year and 6 year degrees, finish their education, and cannot find a job because the government subsidized their education in horrendous fields of work. One such example are people with Masters Degrees in Gender Studies. Thousands get the degree each year, yet there are only a handful of positions available each year. The result are people with educations and no jobs, which were funded by the taxpayer, thus creating a huge burden to the taxpayer.
3. Examples of what we 'need' are entirely your opinion. Personally, I'd rather keep my money and spend it on my neccessities and get a much better deal than let the American government take my money and decide what I can and cannot have. They did it with my education, and I would prefer not to let them do that with my body, my house, or my internet.
4. Can you give an exact, specific example of government's absolute neccessity in reigning in a corporation? Can you give me an exact example of a corporation obtaining a monopoly which was to the detriment of the populace? Also, if monopolies are so bad if corporations have them, then why are you pushing government monopolization of education, health care, and other areas as neccessities? Please don't be so hypocritical.
5. I'd argue that mining gold is a better way to obtain currency to trade than let the government magically create it out of paper.
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1. It's expected that the VA's high medical costs could be higher than that of private institutions, given the fact that it treats veterans, who generally have more physical and mental complications than the average person.
However, I'm pretty sure the idea that the VA's costs are greater than that of private plans is incorrect. I remember this article from back in 2006, for example:
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And all that was achieved at a relatively low cost. In the past 10 years, the number of veterans receiving treatment from the VA has more than doubled, from 2.5 million to 5.3 million, but the agency has cared for them with 10,000 fewer employees. The VA's cost per patient has remained steady during the past 10 years. The cost of private care has jumped about 40% in that same period. [...] Private hospitals, which make their money treating people who come to them sick, don't profit from heavy investments in preventive care... But the VA, which is funded by tax dollars, "has its patients for life," notes Kizer... So to keep government spending down, "it makes economic sense to keep them healthy and out of the hospital." Kizer eliminated more than half the system's 52,000 hospital beds and plowed the money saved into opening 300 new community clinics so vets could have easier access to family-practice-style doctors. He set strict performance standards that graded physicians on health promotion. As the reforms produced results, veterans began "voting with their feet," says Dr. Jonathan Perlin... Hundreds of thousands abandoned private physicians and enrolled in the lower-cost and higher-quality VA care. But that created a new problem. The VA's budget from Congress (currently about $30 billion annually) couldn't cover the influx. By January 2003, with hundreds of thousands waiting six months or more for their first appointment, the VA began limiting access to only vets with service-related injuries or illness or those with low income. |
This article discusses Medicare costs in relation to private care. It points out that administrative costs as a percentage of total costs are lower for Medicare recipients than for those with private plans, but the actual administrative costs (as a total figure, not a percentage) were about 12% lower for those with private plans as of 2005. However, it also points out that, much like with the VA, Medicare covers a higher percentage of patients with severe medical issues than private plans, given it only deals with the elderly.
2. When you refer to the government subsidizing these degrees, do you mean students applying for and recieving financial aid grants or loan? Because the grants are rather hard to get, and the loans are paid back with interest.
Though these subsidies have had a heavy hand in increasing education costs, yes:
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Interestingly, the main effect of federal student aid programs may not be to transfer wealth from taxpayers to students as mentioned, but from taxpayers to academic institutions. That’s because the rise in student subsidies over the decades appears to have fueled inflation in education costs. Tuition and other college costs have soared as subsidies have risen. It is matter of supply and demand. More and more Americans have sought a college education, which has pushed prices higher. Ordinarily, such upward pressure would be restrained by consumers’ willingness and ability to pay, but as government subsidies have helped absorb tuition increases, the public’s budget constraint has been lifted.9 Peter Wood, a professor at Boston University noted that federal subsidies “are seen by colleges and universities as money that is there for the taking . . . tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents.”10 One can look at average cost data to see the inflationary effect of rising student aid. From 1987 to 2007, there was a strong upward trend in average per-student costs of private and public universities (tuition, fees, and room and board). However, if you subtract from those costs federal grants, loans, and tax benefits, there has been only a modest increase over two decades. Consider four-year private colleges and universities. The average real cost (in 2006 dollars) per student rose from $18,122 in 1986 to $30,497 in 2006, a 68 percent increase. But students didn’t bear that large increase because of grants, loans, and tax benefits. After these benefits, the cost grew from $10,943 to $14,158, a much more modest 29 percent increase. A similar pattern holds for price increases and public institutions. |
But, as you can see, that is because academic instutions are using subsidies as an excuse to raise tuition costs. It's a biproduct of for-profit higher education. Make universities public instutions, like Germany, and that problem disappears.
The Huffington Post recently did an excellent piece on the rising costs of for-profit education and student loans. Often, students going after inane degrees like Gender Studies are a matter of deceptive marketing from private institutions. Law Schools are a great example of that. Here are some examples the HuffPost article mentions:
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After the deal closed and Goldman became a partner, employees soon noticed a drastic shift in culture. Longtime admissions managers were replaced, ushering in an era in which recruiters were endlessly hounded by supervisors about hitting weekly enrollment targets. The admissions staff nearly tripled, requiring expanded floor space to accommodate a sales force of more than 2,600 across the country. Management handed down revamped telemarketing scripts designed to prey on poor and uneducated consumers, honing in on their past mistakes in life as a ploy to convince them that college would solve all their problems, according to conversations with more than a dozen current and former Education Management Corp. employees over the past two months. "You'd probe to find a weakness," said Brian Klein, a former admissions employee who worked for three years at Argosy University Online, one of four major colleges operated by EDMC. "You basically take all that failure and all those bad decisions, and you spin it around and put it right back in their face as guilt, to go to this shitty university and run up all of this debt." Just as the subprime mortgage bubble was giving way to a bust that would help trigger a devastating financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, a firm that had been at the center of Wall Street's rampant mortgage speculation, found its way to a new area of explosive growth: In claiming what would eventually become a 41 percent stake in Education Management Corp., Goldman secured itself a means of tapping into the boom in for-profit higher education. The federal government was boosting aid to college students nationwide, just as a declining economy prompted millions of Americans to seek refuge in higher education, leading to dramatically expanding enrollments at many institutions. But unlike in the mortgage markets, where some unwise or unlucky investor got saddled with the bad loans after the festivities ended and home prices fell, this new market in higher education boasted seemingly unlimited growth potential at virtually zero risk. The burden of college loan repayment falls entirely on students' backs, shielding corporations from the consequences of default. The colleges essentially receive all their revenues upfront, primarily through federal government loans and grants for tuition, regardless of whether students are able to gain employment and pay back their loans. [...] But employees recounted a distinct culture shift once the company went private under Goldman Sachs and the other private equity investors, as day-to-day operations warped from a commitment to students and their success into an environment laser-focused on hitting mandated enrollment targets. New recruits were viewed simply as a conduit for federal student assistance dollars, the employees said, and pressure mounted from management to enroll anyone at any cost. Recruiters told people with felony criminal records that pursuing a criminal justice degree would allow them to achieve their dreams of joining the FBI -- an impossible scenario, because the bureau is barred from hiring people who have been convicted of such offenses. They convinced students with no access to a computer or Internet that they could use the local library for classes, even though they would need to save files and download specific software to access coursework. "It just got to the point where I felt like I was lying to these people on a regular basis," said Patrick Flynn, a recruiter at EDMC's South University online from 2006 through 2009, when he quit. "Honestly, I just felt dirty doing the things I was doing. It's almost like they were trying to make me take advantage of people's belief in what this education was going to get them, when I didn't buy into it myself." |
And these people go to high schools and hawk their "*unfeasible career X* is so great!" bullshit. We were told constantly throughout grammer school and high school that we all had to get degrees. A college education was 100% necessary to go anywhere in life. Then we had recruiters coming to our high schools talking about all these terrible career paths that are really "absolutely great" (yet again, law school). Then you pick a major and sign your soul away to years of student loans at a time when you can barely call yourself an adult, have no real world experience, and have no real idea what you're going to do in life. These kids have no idea what they're getting themselves into.
I was lucky enough to avoid this due to a pair of loving parents, but many of my friends are screwed. Even with my scholarships and grant money, I had to go to my dad for over ~20k to get a bachelor's degree, and that's at one of the cheaper schools in my state. We need to get the for-profit mentality far and away from essential services like schools.
4. It's a difference of motives. Corporations are in it for money and power, and this effects the quality and price of what they offer. The government's motive is to provide a service for its people. And, in the end, at least we have some say over the government's actions, so if they go in a direction we don't like, we can call them on it. The number of heads that rolled in 2010 is testimony to that.
If a corporation has a monopoly on a service, they can trim away all but the most essential facets of that service, all while increasing prices as high as is feasible. And if it's an essential good, what choice do people have but pay?
5. Digging money out of the ground is no more or less "magical" than crafting it from trees. Though there are a hell of a lot more trees to go around, I suppose.
