What if we funded education the way we fund health insurance?

[JDPriestly]

What would happen if for-profit companies delivered education to our children the way they do healthcare to all of us?

Think how high education costs would rise if we had a number of companies with highly paid executives and lots of private bureaucracy and profit standing between our children and their teachers.

What if every school had to handle the billing processes of a number of different insurance companies? How much additional staff would that add, how much additional money would it cost to support for-profit schools to deal with the number of students that our socialist public schools instruct?

And the idea that private schools are necessarily better than public ones is baloney. My daughter attended public Magnet schools, was in a college study group with girls who had attended expensive private schools. They were studying chemistry. Guess who had the best high school chemistry teacher? Guess who got the best grade and generally got the best grades in college? You guessed it.

Public education paid for by all of us is the most cost-efficient, effective education.

And guess what? My children who attended public schools got the bonus of attending schools with children from different backgrounds, different races, ethnicities, languages -- a perfect preparation for working in the real world.

If we move to single payer, we will insure everyone and save money per insured. There is no way that single payer will cost us per insured person what our current insurance costs.

What may add to the expense is insuring everyone. But even that will not add as much as we might think. And what kind of person thinks that some people should go without health insurance?

I'd hate to think what kind of person that would be. But when you say that we cannot have single payer insurance, that is effectively what you mean and what you are saying and the kind of person you are.

[VMA131Marine]

1. What is a problem is paying for K-12 schools through property taxes.

It ensures that low income neighbourhoods get worse facilities. There has to be a more equitable way to fund schools so every kid gets a fair shot.

[JDPriestly]

4. Yes. SInglepayer in my experience liviing in four countries in Europe is that a percentage of

your paycheck goes into a single-payer fund and you are insured. Everybody pays the same percent and the money is pooled and everyone is covered.

Healthcare insurance is a right in all other developed countries. Doesn't mean that the government necessarily does all the paperwork. Nonprofits or government can do that. But everyone is insured. And the money is put in one pot and paid out for each insured person from that pot. Additional, private policies that cover extras are available at least in some countries. It's the civilized way to share the benefits of the medical advances we now have.

[DirkGently]

2. Or if your employer picked your kids' school?

The employer-subsidizes system we still have (despite the ACA) is ludicrous. Why on earth would anyone choose to base their health care plan on where they work or what their employer has picked?

And businesses don't want to administer health insurance. It's a huge burden on them, and most struggle to handle it.

[JDPriestly]

5. Businesses don't want to have to administer health insurance. I know. It used to be my job

at one of the businesses in which I worked to pick the health insurance company.

[DirkGently]

10. I've seen employers struggle with this.

One company I know of hired an expert just to negotiate with insurance providers to try to get a deal the company could afford, without shorting the employees. They wanted to do well by everyone, but costs kept going up and benefits down. Every year.

[1939]

7. Employer health care dates from WWII

There were stringent wage and price controls during the war. The industrial unions couldn't bargain for wages as they were frozen by the government. The union execs needed to take something back to their members in a new contract. They got the companies to pay for health care. That started the ball rolling on employer health care and it became an expected perk for all jobs during the late 40s and the 50s.

[Salviati]

3. There are plenty of people who'd like to go that way for education...

... and far too many of them include a (D) after their name.

[GaYellowDawg]

6. Hmmm...

Think how high education costs would rise if we had a number of companies with highly paid executives and lots of private bureaucracy and profit standing between our children and their teachers.

If you altered this just a little bit to:

Think how high tuition costs would rise if we had highly paid administrators and lots of bureaucracy standing between our children and their teachers.

then you would have described EXACTLY what has been happening to most colleges and universities over the past couple of decades.

[JDPriestly]

8. True. And we need to change that.

We need a movement that puts the budgets of universities and colleges out there in front of people.

[world wide wally]

9. For the first time in American history, we are being sold a theory that claims that if we were to

progress it would be like admitting we're not first in something.

[Igel]

11. I miss the point.

Most financial aid offices deal with a variety of loan companies and used to have to find sources for loans.

There are independent scholarship and grant-issuing agencies and organizations.

FAFSA. Numerous other grant applications and scholarship applications.

All of that goes into putting together an aid package, then monitoring its disbursement.

Then the money goes over to the registrar who allows registration and such.


Nobody says private schools are necessarily better than private ones. Consider that a straw man. Some are worse, some are better. Depends on what the public schools are like and what the private schools are like. In my district, many private schools are heads and shoulders above the public ones--with reasonable funding, they still have a very few advanced academic courses, all under-enrolled. Go 10 miles north, and there simply aren't any private schools better than the public ones; at best you get ideology-based schools, Montessori or "unschooling" schools. Private "better" schools are immaterial, since the overwhelming majority of students are in AP/IB/dual-credit courses, and those not in such courses are taking those courses because they don't exist or they don't want a full load of 7 AP/IB/dual-credit courses. Or they simply don't want AP Physics II when they'd rather be taking dual-credit US history.

[JDPriestly]

12. There are no financial aid offices for grades 1-12. And we need to get rid of them, at least

in state schools for college and university.

I went to college in the 1960s. I was an out-of-state student in a public university. My tuition was affordable. I had a scholarship my first year and some help after that. I was able to work part-time and left college with no debt whatsoever. My husband went on the GI bill. That was in the 1960s.

Today, grade and high school is still paid for out of tax money (which is I believe as it should be), but our children graduate from college just like the indentured servants of the 18th and 19th century -- burdened by debilitating debts.

Some do not pay off their debts until they are in their 40s.

We need public funding for public education all grades including college and university.

Public schools can be great.

They were great when I went in the 1950s and 1960s. I went back to school in the 1990s, and I am still paying back my loans. I am 72.

Older people, say in their 50s and 60s should be able to retrain and continue their education without first asking whether they will be able to earn enough to repay student loans in the field for which they are retraining.

I entered a field that paid well after I returned to school at the age of 50. But not all people want to do that. We need physical therapists, teachers, social workers, nurses, medical technicians, business people, psychologists, etc. They should not have to iplace themselves in so much debt to improve thie work skills and knowledge.

We educate ourselves, especially as older people, in order to help others, to make society better, and to pay back to a society and country we love. We should not leave our training, our schools with so much debt. None of us should.