I meant, like, to get rid of ulcers and fetuses and things, you little holistic silly!

Thing is, unless there can come some efficiency breakthroughs, the costs end up rising higher than other things, partly due to the reality that you can't reduce the amount of labor demanded. That is a kicker part to it. I suggest others do more research into it. I haven't found anyone who speaks out and says it is flat out false. Side discussions here, and why it is important and I bring it up, is that the end result is that government sector and welfare will grow, in order to get people to be able to afford needed services. It is called a disease because of the effect being like that and needing to be cured.

But again, the cost only seems to be growing so out of control in areas where the government is tampering with or outright destroying the price system. If welfare is to be done by the government, Hayek makes a very good case that it ought to be done through cash transfers and not with the government providing or subsidizing those services.

Read more on Baumol's Cost Disease.  The argument there is that Is NOT the case.  Yes, the government can make it worse, but it is a systemic issue that can happen in markets, even if free, if certain conditions exists.  To say that the government alone is responsible for it is false, if you consider Baumol's arguments valid.  The thing is that, you can't just have markets fix everything, if resourses are both needed and lacking, and the standard of living rises to make the demands on them so.  Well, you can have a free market situation, but the end result is the services get priced out of market, so people end up lacking basic services like health coverage, because they can't afford it.  Lack of government intervention doesn't reverse this.  That is the issue with Baumol's cost disease that needs to be refuted here.  This is post Hayek's work. 

Neither does government intervention reverse this, especially if the intervention is counterproductive, and both destroying the price system and stifling the very innovation that is needed to drive down prices would seem to be exceedingly counterproductive.

Baumol says that the biggest danger with the cost disease is not the disease itself, as it almost cures itself because the growth of buying power is still outpacing the increasing cost of things, but in reactionist responses to it. So as long as we don't do anything drastic, like shift resources from the public sector to the private or start excessively rationing, everything will eventually be hunky-dory. That seems... ridiculously, wildly Pollyannaish.

Don't forget about Gonorrhea!  We had an easy time fighting it up till now...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/08/first-antibiotic-resistant-gonorrhea-cases-detected-in-north-america

I think it's less that and more, nobody knows who Hayek was.

Or Keynes for that matter.  Most of the stuff done in the name of Keynes is stuff he wouldn't of supported.  His kind of stimulus actually would probably look a lot more "new age conservative" then the one we got.  Tax cuts, and government spending specifically done to help the rich and buisnsesses to keep money flowing.

Policy makers and pundits rarely seem to know anything about what they legislate... and in the few cases where they do, troublingly seem to have no problem completley ignoring it when it goes against what they want.  (See Paul Krugman for example.)

Yeah. Nowadays they're mostly known for being the best white rappers on the planet.

I'd love to see what Keynes would have thought of neo-Keynesians.

Baumol doesn't oppose a nationalized health system to insure universal health care and enable the poor and middle class to get healthcare.  It is important to show where he is opposed to day.  He did state reactionary situations such as price controls, adn other things, can make it worse.  

Hmm... it seems your reaction to it isn't that it isn't going to happen, but that the belief the free market will sort it out itself, is seen as absurd.  It semes like you don't believe the cost disease will work itself out.

That can't be true of either health care or college.

Why? Virtualization. Colleges now offer online courses, which do away with a lot of the labor-intensive work (grading papers, giving the same lecture/course over and over again). Additionally, with health care, you have robotics and telemedicine which can decrease the amount of labor.

Even if the cost disease is correct, the problem is that it doesn't apply to those fields. Yes, they can be labor intensive, but technology can make them more productive - that is if they bother with it. In some cases, thanks to market distortion, that doesn't always happen, as the government doesn't care about efficiency or productivity increases.

For example, in Ohio, we have multiple K-12 virtual academies - all of them are cheaper than brick & mortar schools. Why? Costs are lower, as one teacher can handle more kids thanks to automation. Of course, the typical public schools hate this, because it takes away funding, regardless if there is a qualitative advantage via virtual education.