Single Payer Student Loans
Imagine, if you will, a government that faces an urgent public need. This government decides, after an appropriate amount of pressure, to enact a law, a series of programs, to meet that need. The government has two options: enact the programs directly, in a very efficient manner with minimal overhead, helping the maximum number of people. Alternately, the government can please the free market fundamentalists (and large campaign donors) who pay off many of its representatives, and pay a private company, or cartel of companies, to provide the exact same service, at far higher price.
Only, of course, it’s not the exact same service. Inevitably, the private contractors will gouge, cut corners, and harass their other clients, the citizens. C’est la vie. A profit must be made.
Now imagine that after years of this arrangement, the government is in a desperate crunch for cash, and wants to cut the gravy train to help enact another major program. They decide that, gee, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bribe a private company to treat its citizens like garbage, providing the exact same service (on paper) that the government could have provided, only at far higher cost. Wouldn’t it make sense, the representatives of that government argue, to do it ourselves?
All well and good, right. Only what’s the new program? Why, it’s to address an urgent public need… by paying a cartel of private companies… to provide a service that (in the rest of the developed world) is normally done by government… only they want to be paid a premium to do it, of course… and they need their profits guaranteed, of course…
Yeesh.
This is seriously what we’re faced with now in the debate over Health Care Reform. One badly designed, government-bestowed oligarchy is to be cut to help pass the law constructing a much larger, meaner, even more evil government-bestowed oligarchy.
I mean, seriously. I hate Sallie Mae as much as the next college student, but they don’t kill 45,000 people a year, like the semi-privatized healthcare system does in America.
When you think about it, the current student loan mess is far more liberal than the Obama plan for health care. Really; the federal government does a lot of direct lending. In effect, they already act as a public option in the student lending market.
Yet it hasn’t been enough; private companies still gouge students and the government simultaneously, and the price of education has slipped further out of the reach of American students. Something had to be done, and that something was to nationalize the process, saving a buttload of money. (Which I wholeheartedly support)
However, I can’t help but wonder why it’s ok to stick a shiv in one group of usurious private sector parasites, while cozying up to a much larger and more vicious group at the same time.