How interesting that changes to the student loan program will be folded into the health care bill. While this is mainly a matter of political convenience/wisdom for the Obama administration, this smaller issue also has an interesting, almost poetic, relationship to health care.
In student loans, we see the early sprouting of the same breed of acorn that gave birth to our health care mess: the concept that private jobbers must be given an intermediary role in what is more naturally a direct relationship between a government and the people. In health care, this led to our crazy quilt of employer-based health insurance, and a whole network of companies whose profit margins provided no added value except to the companies themselves.
Now, in student loans, we see a replicable lab experiment that has allowed us to examine and study the same process. It has not worked; or rather, it has not provided any added value. The case the administration makes for cutting out the middleman and using the $60 billion "savings" to provide more direct support to education programs is a slam dunk.
Naturally, Republicans, their knees jerking uncontrollably, have opposed it. They support cost-cutting in government programs except when they might restrict the flow of tax dollars to private interests. The "concern" that it would be "more difficult" for students and colleges to deal with the government directly is both unproven and laughably petty (is this convenience really worth $60 billion?). In any case, loan servicing would remain in the hands of those ever-effective private and quasi-private institutions, so nothing is lost there. The "concern" about jobs lost is a red herring, in light of the infinitesimally greater number of jobs lost as a result of the great Republican-generated economic crash of 2008.
Critics of the health care reforms now on the table like to raise the bogeyman of "government bureaucrats" coming between freedom-loving Americans and their doctors. They prefer that corporate bureaucrats, whose mission is to pump up profits by denying claims and questioning a physician's recommendations, be the ones to come between Americans and their doctors. The situation is no different in the realm of student loans. It's high time to stomp on this would-be mighty oak of corporate entitlement before it gets any larger.
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