3 thoughts on “What Will Republican Health-Care Reform Look Like?”

  1. As an aside, it looks like they messed up student loans too.

    If a final piece of legislation before the Senate is approved, millions of students will get their federal loans directly from the Department of Education. In other words, the federal government would sweep aside private competitors in the biggest change to the federal student-loan program since its creation in 1965. It’s a legitimate government takeover.

    […]

    Gone will be the subsidies, and gone will be the FFEL program. As of July 1, all new student loans will go through the Direct Loan program. The savings–an estimated $61 billion over 10 years–will be used to shore up and increase the need-based Pell Grant program by $36 billion and invest in community colleges. While the Administration has reason enough to crow about the proposed measures, it has had to scale back some of its bigger plans. An earlier version of the bill would have invested an additional $20 billion and offered even more substantial financial-aid increases. As it stands, $13.5 billion will be used to stem Pell Grant shortfalls resulting from the increased number of students forced back to college by the ailing economy. And a plan to raise the maximum Pell amount to almost $7,000 per year by 2020 has been replaced with one that maxes out at about $6,000.

    The only problem with these changes? They toss more money into a program that doesn’t need it, exacerbate education inflation, and they don’t address the loan default problem.

  2. They toss more money into a program that doesn’t need it

    Pell Grants pay a much smaller fraction of average tuition than they did 20 years ago — the money is much needed.

    exacerbate education inflation

    Pell Grants aren’t close to keeping up with education inflation, much less driving it. “Don’t let poor students afford college, it’ll drive up the price” has to be one of the dumbest arguments I’ve heard in a while.

    they don’t address the loan default problem

    And they don’t give everyone a pony, either. But they do redirect $6 billion a year — a huge sum, approximately 1/3 of what we spend on NASA — away from politically-connected lenders and to poor students, community colleges, and reducing the deficit. As policy, it’s a slam dunk.

  3. “And they don’t give everyone a pony, either. But they do redirect $6 billion a year — a huge sum, approximately 1/3 of what we spend on NASA — away from politically-connected lenders and to poor students, community colleges, and reducing the deficit. As policy, it’s a slam dunk.”

    How about slam dunking your head into the toilet and letting the people who earned that money keep it?

Comments are closed.