It's a damn shame we've let this crisis reach this scale. Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt, our inauguration, and so on, we've been essentially frozen for most of my life as politicians concern themselves more so with existential power struggle. The right wants to bring us back to the gilded age, the left makes headlines but is barely relevant, and the center is trying to squeeze bandaid solutions whil…
>"Along with healthcare, climate change, the debt," There's an interesting parallel with the cost of healthcare. Increases in costs for both seem to outstrip inflation year over year. And there's lots of of people making lots of money in both sectors. And yet nobody in either sector seems to be able to say exactly why the costs are increasing at the untenable rates they are. The only thing Washington ever seems to do…
Providers charge whatever they want, because they know you really don't have a choice and that insurance is picking up the bill, and if insurance won't pay you can go after the patient. Patients don't have any way to price shop (it's usually impossible to know the cost of a procedure or service before you get it, nor what will really be covered by insurance) and are insulated from most of the costs by their insurance.
In education, a huge chunk of the tab is covered by loans, which makes students price-insensitive, and the institution has no real incentive to hold costs down, in fact they actually use the fancy rec center and stadium to attract students. They can also run up the gen-ed courseload to artificially increase the amount of time it takes to graduate. Students have no real flexibility here either, because it's not like you can take a class at another university because it's too much, or choose to pass on a gen-ed.
The sad truth about healthcare is there's just too many middlemen all taking their cut and it all adds up. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors all need to make their cut, and by the time the service is delivered it's extremely expensive. Most other countries impose a lot more price controls, reduce the number of middlemen, and provide doctors with free education to increase the supply and remove the need to repay their own steep student loans (iirc you are looking at about $400k these days). Fixing the problem involves taking on a number of very powerful lobbying groups at the same time and is going to piss off a lot of people whose gravy-train would come to an end.
In schools, the problem largely comes down to reducing the amount of administrators and reducing the spend on non-essential facilities (rec center, stadium, etc). The actual teachers themselves are usually overworked and underpaid, the money is disappearing at an institution/administration level.