Mustang Rambles

As Thomas Sowell said today in my paper, health costs are rising but so is health care capabilities. In his column about medical care costs he describes the rising costs of automobiles with all their improvements in safety that nobody seems to worry about, along with the rising costs of housing with all the new space and conveniences. You really need to read him with regularity.

Nobody (except the federal government) seems to care about these things. We are content to let the market keep track of how much we pay for them. Why should we worry about health care? What is so important about it that we need to knock the cost down? Look at another critical facet of American life where the costs have risen exorbitantly and no one seems to care, or at least protest.

Those who have to pay the costs seem to accept it, many get loans that they have to pay back for many years, just to gamble that their education will pay off in the end. Of course, I’m talking about tuition costs that have consistently risen about the cost of living year after year. Harvard, I hear, because of the bad economy and their great, open love of mankind, is reducing its’ increase to a mere 4.3% this year. How much was the COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) granted to our elderly (SS) this year? Some estimates have it a 5+%. In prior years, the COLA was around 2%, about 2.3% less than the Harvard cutback. This shows that Harvard has actually been doubling or tripling the annual cost of living increase in its’ tuition hikes for years.

I know that President Obama, who managed to get scholarships to his universities, has proposed to fund college for everybody. That is different from his trying to legislate control of the running-away tuition hikes. Or is that coming down the road? Hmmm, you university CEOs, (yes, I know that universities are run like businesses), might want to look at the monster liberal movement that you have put together in your closed-minded classrooms.