Next up, let's forgive home mortgage debt!
As I said when GeneralMacArthur made this crap analogy a couple of weeks ago, you can easily get your mortgage forgiven. Hand the house back over to the bank.
But people don't do it because they're basically guaranteed to have a valuable asset at the end of their financial obligation.
A college degree is supposed to be a valuable asset at the end of a person's financial obligation. It's just not one you can sell.
Student debt forgiveness is bullsh*t. If you want to do it, the programs at those universities whose graduates required it should be curtailed via dropping all future federal government funding to those programs due to failure of that college of the university and its degree to give those graduates worth comparable to cost to where they could pay back the debt. If that was threatened, the calculus of who is accepted into said programs at these universities would change immediately. No such analysis was carried out, because of course not.
My mom ran the finances for a public hospital for 30 years and she told me several times Medicare paid 19 cents to the dollar. That's how out of whack published costs are compared to what the government pays. So who pays the remaining 81 cents? You do when you get your bill. Meanwhile the markets gets bastardized by requiring providers in some markets to cover everyone which means they govern as a soft guaranteed monopoly in their area and in so doing so gouge everyone else that can afford to pay. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.html
I agree that the costs are out of control. That doesn't mean it's right to saddle 17 year olds with decades of debt for pursuing educations their parents paid for working part time at Wendy's. It is just not at all equivalent to a mortgage or any other kind of debt.
As for medical costs, they are made up. You are mad at Medicare recipients because you pay $85 for two ibuprofen tablets. Be mad at the "health" industry helping themselves to record profits on the backs of the worst and most inefficient system of medical care in the developed world.
Ban advertising and marketing to doctors. That should solve a few problems.
