Should college and university education be tuition-free? According to Bernie Sanders, it should be.
Just recently, I heard of a youngster entering the workforce having just graduated from college sporting a student debt of $100,000. That, to me, is patently obscene. He’ll never be able to retire that debt. He would have been far better off bypassing college and going to work for a plumber and learning that trade. He would start off making a good income with no student debt and the college grad will still be paying for his school for years to come.
How about medical costs? Should your visit to the hospital for an appendectomy be free or should someone else have to pay the $25,000 cost? Wouldn’t it be great if all of this were just free for the taking? It reminds me of a Merle Haggard song about “drinking free Bubble Up and eating rainbow stew,” but free stuff is a fantasy.
It costs a bundle to run a college. College professors and administrators make huge incomes. Hospitals are money mills. (If you don’t think so, just see what a 5-cent aspirin costs in the hospital.) The medical profession has continued to increase their prices to the point of obscenity.
Several years ago, some enterprising doctors got together and came up with what has become health-care insurance, a plan to help pre-pay for medical care. Today, even the government has decided to require employers to provide this insurance for employees, and it has continued to flood the medical profession with ridiculous amounts of money.
But what if there was no health-care insurance? Who would pay for medical service and what would it cost then? Would it fall to the government? And exactly who is the “government?” Isn’t the government, “we the people?” If there was no insurance, would medicine cost what it does now?
Today, most medical costs are being covered by various companies, but this week a problem arose. UnitedHealth, one of the country’s largest health-care insurance providers, is terminating their association with ObamaCare because of huge financial losses. They reportedly lost more than $600 million under the program.
I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but we have problems. There is no free stuff. Somebody has to pay. Bernie thinks the rich will just have to pay more. I have some news for Bernie and the other politicians who are looking for ways to extract more money from the so-called “rich.” They are probably a lot smarter than the politicians who are trying to bilk them. They didn’t get rich by being stupid.
In the final analysis, education and medicine are commodities. They are for sale. The purveyors of education and medicine are in the business of making a profit. Unless the government wishes to re-name those commodities as “public utilities,” thereby regulating them as such, another solution will have to be found.
To the purveyors of higher education and medical care, I would offer this bit of advice. Remember the goose that laid the golden egg? Be careful you don’t kill your goose. I would think they are pretty rare. Some serious discussion concerning restraint might be in order. Both education and medical costs are rising far faster than the economy itself. So fast the economy cannot sustain them. Something is going to have to give and it isn’t going to be a Sander’s presidency, incidentally another fantasy, with free stuff for all. There is no free.
