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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare. It's a healthcare problem in education, healthcare costs are going up by 15% a year and that money isn't there. That's why you hear about teacher layoffs while your property taxes go up and think it's bullshit.

And hang out in a ghetto sometime if you want to see what's teaching kids that crime is ok.

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Healthcare may explain why we can't spend yet more than the more-we've-ever-spent-before we're currently spending, but it can't explain why we spend so much more and seem to be getting less and less.

Really, very few of the problems we're facing can be explained by not spending enough; rather more can be explained by spending too much with no regard for what we get for our money, then letting people say "well, we just need more money to solve that problem".

If only we used an economic system whereby we actually accepted and utilized feedback about how our money was being spent, instead of spending our time demonizing the very idea that one should be permitted to examine the question of what one is getting for one's taxes, and simply being told to shut up and fork more over. Alas.

It precisely explains why we're spending more and more and getting less and less.

Compound 15% out over 15 years.

Educational reform is a broad subject and there's lots of room for experimentation. I'm fine with properly implemented charter schools, especially for the "thousand laboratories" effect. I don't think that chanting "markets" like a religious incantation is particularly effective. But most importantly, don't underestimate the effect of that healthcare cost.

As you commented to someone else in an earlier branch, carry that out a few steps; why might healthcare costs rise so much faster than any reasonable measure of the output which funds both education and healthcare?. I don't know the answer. I think the point is that "health care" cannot be pointed out as the root cause, much as "markets" cannot be pointed out as the only solution.

Healthcare can indeed be pointed to as the primary cause of cost inflation in education, because, well, it is.

Don't take my word for it. Go to your local town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last decade, then scan the line items. Unless your locality has something very different going on than everywhere else, you'll see huge increases in healthcare costs and cost-cutting relative to inflation everywhere else.

I think the point is that healthcare costs can't be the cause, because they are just a symptom of a broken healthcare market. The actual cost of medical supplies and doctor salaries isn't astronomical, but the price that employers and patients pay is. That disconnect, due to a lack of a sufficient combination of market forces and regulation, is what's bankrupting the country. Saying that healthcare costs are the problem is stopping short, and puts the attention where it can't actually fix things.

It precisely explains why we're spending more and more and getting less and less.

No.

Healthcare costs are up for everyone, everywhere, in every industry. The same increases that education has to pay for, every other employer does as well.

If other industries are not spending 15% compounded, and delivering less, then why is it happening in education?

Except teachers unions negotiate their benefits and labor contracts, and they tend to be tilted towards the interests of those with more tenure, which is not really how private enterprise operates. Also, outsourcing allowed many companies to not face 15% increases overall in health care costs as they scaled back US jobs to counter.

Also, in many states teachers receive retiree health benefits, which were not funded by setting aside money during these teachers' working years- very few private industries still have these (extremely expensive, especially if you retire pre-65/Medicare) benefits, but education does and this stuff is going to be a budgetary minefield for the foreseeable future.

Healthcare costs have risen for decades for _all_ industries. Most of them have realized productivity gains and quality improvements. Education hasn't.

And the higher cost / pupil ratio in poorly performing urban districts is a pretty important counterfactual to the spending / quality correlation.

EDIT Downvoted, with someone making the same argument a moment after I did. At least the downvoter is _consistently_ childish.

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