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DesideriScuri -> RE: Middle East & West - Western society forever changed (8/23/2016 3:16:25 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Edwird
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I've already put up a multitude of graphs for display, from the most creditable sources, not from grocery boys, ... but the bottom line is that the economics are indisputable that single payer healthcare systems and free or relatively low cost education benefits society the best.
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Sweden has higher income taxes, but much lower cost healthcare and higher education. Even with their students having debt burden after graduation, just not nearly the level as in the US.
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Edwird, forgive me if you've already shown the graphics, but could you repost the graphs that show the amount of spending before and after a country switched to single payer, or some other form of public health care? That's the only way to give any solid evidence for what healthcare spending in the US would do if we move to a public care system.
The argument that if the US changed over to a public health care system that costs would come into line with nations who already have it is bullshit. Back in the 50's, US spending was, roughly, in the same ballpark as every other countries' spending. That's about when most of them started changing over to a public care system. What's happened since? US spending has increased A LOT more than any other countries'. No one's spending has gone down, though. What's really interesting is that US spending didn't start to diverge much until the mid-60's. What happened in the mid-60's in the US, relevant to healthcare? Medicare, maybe?
Regarding the cost of schooling....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-aid-means-higher-tuition-1437345298quote:
Politicians like to wax about making college more affordable, so it’s ironic that their solutions—cheap loans and taxpayer cash—end up increasing the cost of a degree. The latest evidence that schools jack up tuition to absorb federal money comes in a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Annual student loan originations have more than doubled since 2001, to $120 billion in 2012, and the government backs about 90% of these borrowings. Meantime, average tuition has climbed 46%.
The authors wondered if the expansion of federal aid programs helped fuel the rise, a contested question since 1987 when then-Education Secretary William Bennett said that aid “enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.” The Fed researchers looked at how colleges responded when Congress bumped up per pupil aid limits between 2006 and 2008. Sure enough, students took out more loans, but universities gobbled up most of the money.
Ohio University economist Richard Vedder connected these dots a decade ago, estimating in 2006 that every dollar of grant aid raised tuition 35 cents. He now looks prescient. The New York Fed study found that for every new dollar a college receives in Direct Subsidized Loans, a school raises its price by 65 cents. For every dollar in Pell Grants, a college raises tuition by 55 cents. This is one reason tuition has outpaced inflation every year for decades, while the average borrower now finishes college owing more than $28,000.
Too conservative for ya?
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/what-s-behind-america-s-soaring-college-costs/360462/quote:
The ability of colleges to raise costs has been facilitated by a sharp increase in federal student aid. Lenders freely dispense credit to students, safe in the knowledge that all loans are guaranteed by the government. Between 1973 and 2012, federal aid (inflation-adjusted) increased more than 500 percent. Looking at a shorter period, between 2002 and 2012, total federal aid to students ballooned an inflation-adjusted 106 percent to $170 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.htmlquote:
ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.
In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.
Government is at the heart of both issues, in the US. Once side of that heart is the for-profit system in the US (which has been in place for generations before all the skyrocketing costs), and the other is government enabling the system through regulations that don't really help, public funding, public spending, cheap money, etc.
ETA: I've said it before that I'd support a Constitutional Amendment (which I believe is required) authorizing the Federal Government to move us to a public option. I kinda like how it's done in the UK.
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