Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

>thus cost everyone including the government even more money...

Americans were simply going without healthcare, so it was unavoidable that it was going to cost the whole country more money.

>I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system.

Because once the government gives a subsidy to a certain tribe, that tribe no longer has an incentive to vote to increase that subsidy to members of other tribes.

For example, in the US, old people have had healthcare for many decades. And they have the highest voting rates. But as a politician, you are not going to get far advertising that you will increase their taxes so that non old people can receive healthcare, especially if many of those non old people do not look like the old people.

But, completely screwing people is also politically unpopular, so what can pass is a half measure, like Medicaid, where politicians can say they helped people get healthcare, but also keep taxes low. How? Well, you simply pay the doctors and drug makers and dentists less for people covered by Medicaid. And you pay more for people covered by Medicare.

And as the tribes get more and more politically influential, you can keep adding various tiers of subsidy recipients. And that is the beauty of “health insurance companies”, or rather, “managed care organizations”.

Businesses with young, healthy, office workers can pool their health risks into less risky pools and pay much higher reimbursements so they get premium healthcare.

Poor people get directed to Medicaid, which will have a network of fewer and overburden doctors so they get less care, and less quality care.

Medicare will provide old people with enough healthcare to keep their votes coming.

Federal and military employees get decent healthcare because their coverage pays more.

Others get dumped onto the statewide exchanges that are you get what you pay for type deals.

And all of this is funneled through the managed care organizations so that people cannot easily measure who is getting what and who is getting more from the system versus less.

So tl:dr is that as a country, we do not actually want to help everyone equally. Just enough to say they were helped, but at the same time, make sure we get as much of the pie for ourselves as possible, and give up as little as possible.

That is not profit. If an insurance business picks up 10% more clients that cost 5,000% higher expenses, they cannot just increase premiums 10%. They have to increase premiums a lot more.

Not to mention that the ACA forced insurers to subsidize old people from the young (maximum age rating factor), health to sick (can only price based on age, location, and tobacco status), and imposed out of pocket maximums. All of these mean the insurance company is spending a lot more after ACA than before ACA, and all of that had to be recouped as revenue from premiums, otherwise you have bankruptcy.

Also, all the US health insurance company financials are public. You can see their profit margin is a steady ~5% for over a decade. They are spending $95 for every $100 in premiums they take in.

From the original comment:

> "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human resources, development and Land, Buildings & Real Estate. Stanford will be the city’s third-largest employer in Redwood City."

Administration for the school of medicine is literally the first group cited.

Stanford Medical is everywhere around here.

> Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators.

Mmm... I read an article once that pointed out that there are two basic schools of thought on "why college is so expensive today". Some people say it's more expensive to run a college, and so tuition has to cover that. And some people say it's more important to have a degree, or easier to get your college expenses financed, and so tuition expands to meet demand.

It's very easy to distinguish between these two theories at a basic level: one of them says that prices have gone up because supply has fallen, and the other says prices have gone up because demand has risen. But the article pointed out that, while these two causes have the same directional effect on prices, they have opposite effects on quantity sold: if supply has fallen, you see fewer purchases at higher prices, whereas if demand has risen, you see more purchases at higher prices.

And it's very clear that colleges are in the second scenario, with prices and enrollment rising in tandem.

But "it's because of administration costs" is a supply-has-fallen theory. It would make more sense to explain Stanford's luxury campus for administrators by saying that Stanford has so much money coming in, the administrators can afford to help themselves.

Good twitter comment re Purdue bucking the trend. https://twitter.com/ElberfeldTom/status/1588366784045817856?...