In America, higher education is skyrocketing. However, until recently, the phenomena seemed to me, to be rather self-contained. It was only when I was considering the situation of the poor, the fact that, while they may be paid enough to stay in a home and get food, that they are not really be paid enough to account for unexpected medical costs, that I saw any kind of connection. There are a lot of theories about why medical services are so expensive: pharmaceutical research costs, legal costs, even the cost of motivating people to join the profession.

One common thread, however, between most medical problems is that all of them start with high levels of education. The pharmaceutical industries is made possible by researchers. These researchers all have to have high degrees in medicine and chemistry. That costs money. Getting into law school, getting your masters in law, that all costs money. Medical school is by far the most notorious for its costs, four years requiring all of your attention and that too, costs a lot of money.

Every student who goes into medical school or into law school has to exit school and then charge a suitable amount to get a return on their investment. This is not out of any kind of selfish motive, but rather because they exit school in debt. That debt turns, not only into higher prices, but pursuit of more expensive services. Services that do not need to be performed to find a diagnosis are being performed every day. One the one hand, it helps avoid legal bills, on the other hand it helps pay off medical school. In the legal field, law schools are already putting too many lawyers out into the work force than there is demand. So naturally, some opportunistic of lawyers would turn into ambulance chasers just to find a job. As far as pharmaceuticals, researchers who want to stay employed must continually invent new projects to be involved in, new medicines that need to be invented. This is good in the sense that more knowledge is being pursued, but bad in the sense that useful medications are bearing the brunt of the support for largely useless medications or redundant medications.

So, will reducing the cost of schooling reduce the cost of medical services? Certainly not immediately. Every year, we are graduating students drenched in debt. Many of those who graduated in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006 are going to be paying back those debts for quite some time. Even if we enacted an effective bill right now, the effects of that bill might only be seen in part of the population ten or twenty years down the road, but, it is a point. If higher education cost less, then I believe the costs of legal, research and medical services would go down. Also, there is an even harder question we have to ask ourselves: how the heck do we decrease the cost of higher education?

Good ideas! Higher education is definitely too expensive and I am not sure what is making it so expensive. Is it the facilities? Professors? Extra-curricular activities? Research? Miss you!
» Rachel (98.245.159.47) on 2011-01-09 07:03:31

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