Gov't Drives Up Cost of Services

CNS News has a story about how federal aid is driving up the cost of a college education:

"College enrollment over the last 20 years has gone dramatically up because of [federal] subsidies," Tim Carney, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, told the conservative Young America's Foundation conference in Washington, D.C.

Carney said colleges have grown accustomed to receiving federal dollars, which he said enables schools to continually raise prices without hurting students' ability to pay.

"Some students will win, all taxpayers will lose and many students will lose as well," he said.

Carney noted that every year since 1982, tuition has increased at a higher rate than inflation, and from 1983 to 2003 federal aid increased more than 500 percent, to $122 billion.

As it happens, this is exactly the same thing that's happening with health care. Since the government subsidizes about half of all health care expenditures (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), more people take advantage of the system, which drives up demand for services, just as with education.

And as with any system involving finances, the system gets used to the free-flowing dollars from the government, which drives up costs for everyone, whether they have insurance or not.

Costs were not so insane before government and insurance blanketed the market. My mother-in-law gave me a copy of the hospital bill for the birth of my wife and her twin sister about 39 years ago. It was something like $68. Yes, sixty-eight dollars. That's about $10,000 less than my last child cost four years ago.

We need to get government OUT of health care and Rep. Joel Dykstra told me recently, get the individual back as the actual health care customer.