Krugman Says Health Care Is Like Education
Nick Gillespie | August 27, 2007, 3:59pm
Reader Jim Mack points to today's NY Times' col by Paul Krugman, which argues:
We offer free education, and don't worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don't need, because that's the only way to ensure that every child gets an education - and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.
The whole thing is here (the Times did kill the subscription wall, didn't they?).
Needless to say--and as the father of two kids in public schools and as a taxpayer--I do worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don't need. Certainly it seems indisputable that the public financing of mandatory K-12 education has produced a bloated, underperforming bureaucracy that serves the least-well-off worst of all. Which is not to say that all public schools are terrible, or even that public schooling has not helped create opportunities for people who would otherwise be screwed. But given the monopoly status of tax-funded schools, it's hardly surprising that K-12 education is far from a robust market in terms of product differentiation, competing models, etc. (Indeed, higher ed in the U.S., though heavily subsidized through tax dollars, is a far more varied market largely because schools have to compete for students and funding dollars.)
Krugman is talking here about health care in his col, specifically about proposals to massively boost spending on S-CHIP, a decade-old program designed to give poor kids health care. Boosters of the program want it cover kids in households making up to 400 percent of the poverty line, as opposed to the current limit of 250 percent of the poverty line.
I am curious to readers' responses to his analogy between education and health care. I can think of various arguments against it but wonder if those readers who agree with Milton Friedman on school vouchers would agree with the same ideas transferred into health care:
Vouchers [wrote Friedman in 1955] "would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy."...
[Friedman told Reason in 2005]: I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used. We need a system in which the government says to every parent: "Here is a piece of paper you can use for the educational purposes of your child. It will cover the full cost per student at a government school. It is worth X dollars towards the cost of educational servics that you purchase from parochial schools, private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, or other purveyors of educational services. You may add from your own funds to the voucher if you wish to and can afford to." (I try to avoid calling government schools public schools because I think that's a very misleading term.)
Friedman on the 50th anniversary of creating the school voucher idea here.
James QuentinClark | August 27, 2007, 8:44pm | #
I am a public school teacher as well and I feel obligated to comment here because there's a lot of misunderstanding with this topic.
"A Teacher"'s quote of Thomas Jefferson is hilariously ironic given the nature of teacher's unions and the public school system. Under a mass government monopoly education system, EVERYONE is COMPELLED to pay for the indoctrination of children by certified government officials whether they have children or not, whether they agree with what is taught or not. To work in many places in America, I had to join a teacher's union. The unions took the dues people paid and used much of the money for political purposes. In California, the unions fought tooth and nail against an initiative that would allow union members to keep the portion of their money used for political contributions. The unions didn't want their members even to have the choice to not donate to parties they might disagree with. The unions are doing exactly what Jefferson protested against.
Secondly, the idea that vouchers take money from public schools is only an argument if you believe that public schools are doing a bang up job. Why is a failing school entitled to funding by parents who wish to educate their children elsewhere? Should we be forced to contribute to unsanitary failing hospitals, crumbling housing, or shitty restaurants? More uniform curriculum and more testing is precisely what schools DON'T need. NiceGuy suggested that if schools were privatized, the private schools would come to look like the current public school system, but that's totally absurd.
Over the last 100 years, every industry from communications to transportation to housing and food - all of them have completely been revolutionized by competition and technological change. Yet classroom education continues to use a model from the 16th century. Private education is similar in structure to public education, but because it depends on the VOLUNTARY payments from parents, it has a much higher rate of satisfying the needs of parents and indeed, the students tend to do much better.
Private and home schooled students do better than public school students for a fraction of the cost, but that isn't even the main point. Government management of industry is rarely pursued in the name of quality and abundance; people fight for socialized healthcare and public schooling because they believe it creates a system that is fair and because those industries constitute "basic needs." The first reason is false and the second is the root of totalitarianism.
We'll never know what kind of educational system America could have created had the system remained free throughout the 20th century. We'll probably never know for the 21st either.
Brian Courts | August 27, 2007, 11:14pm | #
I'm referring to how expensive it is for good private schools (which since they are private must be slim, flexible, administratively bottom heavy enterprises that face a great deal of real competition, eh?)
MNG, no, not at all. You are still using the current system (both government run and limited private) to project that providing a good education is expensive. I say there is no reason to think you can simply apply that reasoning to what would become a vastly different structure of providing education.
The current private schools represent a very small percentage of the overall school population, so right there you ought to be very skeptical of drawing any broad conclusions about what would happen with a large-scale private provision of education.
Further, the current very limited number of private schools are of course catering largely to those who can afford not only to pay taxes supporting the government run schools, but have enough left over for private tuition. The vast majority are essentially forced to send their kids to a government run school because nobody is crazy enough to try to run a low-cost private school in competition with a "no-cost" public one (and by "no-cost" I mean no marginal cost as you have already been forced to pay for it). So, all that is left for private schools is the top tiers of the income distribution. Since there is simply now way such a scenario is going to produce low-cost private schools, again, any data about private school costs gathered from the current system is of little or no value in analyzing an entirely different regime.
Imagine if the government taxed everyone to provide government run grocery stores, but then provided most basic groceries in them for "free". Nobody would be dumb enough to open a low-cost private grocery to try to compete with the tax-funded monopoly of the state. The only private grocery market would be the very high-end stores which would necessarily cater to the wealthy, face little competition, and be very few in numbers. You can bet that if someone then argued for the privatization of grocery stores the we would here claims such as yours about private education: that grocery stores are capital intensive; that providing good groceries is very expensive; that under a private scheme many people would be denied access to affordable food, or to fruits, veggies and other healthy foods, if not outright forced to eat dog food. Of course we know such a claim to be patently absurd as the abundance of cheap food, including healthy food (even if people choose not to eat it) provided by private grocery stores demonstrates (a market with stores catering to all income levels and personal tastes, by the way). I suspect we'll find your claims about privately provided education to be equally as wrong, should we move to such a system.
Finally, as mentioned above, current private schools face little real competition because of their very limited numbers and the quite small segment of the population they serve, so yet again, looking to them as models of the efficiency a private market would produce is useless.
