What's Left 8: Health Care Is a Human Right

Ted Rall on Mar 30, 2024

Because college dropouts do not enjoy the college wage premium, their loans should be forgiven entirely or heavily discounted.

But the duty of leftists is not merely to tinker at the edges to make a troubled system fairer or more efficient. We look at a situation and ask: Do we need a complete overhaul? If we were inventing America's higher education system from scratch, is what we have now anything close to what we would come up with?

It's hard to imagine that anyone, regardless of their general political orientation, would say that we have the best possible way to educate young people and prepare them for the future of work and life in general. The average household with student loan debt owes $55,000. Over a 10-year term at 6.9%, the total due including interest is $76,000. That's the cost of a starter home in many parts of the country, and much more than students and their families spend in virtually any other nation.

Thirty-nine nations, including European powerhouses like France and Germany but also poor ones like Greece and Portugal, as well as developing socialist countries like Cuba and Brazil, currently offer their citizens college for free or for nominal fees.

We can, too.

Students and parents borrowed $95 billion in the 2021-22 academic year. Going forward, then, replacing every penny borrowed as student loans as a free federal grant would cost the government about $100 billion-a tiny portion of the $4.5 trillion a year we're currently wasting on the military and other misbegotten budgetary priorities.

There is also an argument for nationalizing public and/or private institutions of higher education. A college education, after all, will remain essential for a significant segment of the population even if we abolish employers' current obsession with overcredentialization. Goods and services that are essential for contemporary human existence are, by definition, too important to be left to the fickle whims of a boom-and-bust marketplace. A college education surely qualifies. Higher education is too expensive a cost for cities and states to absorb. For the feds, however, it's not that big a deal. Moving to federal control would create economies of scale and countless efficiencies, such as the ability to negotiate discounted prices for textbooks and equipment, plus the ability to transfer professors and personnel throughout the system in accordance with educators' desires and regional needs.

Next: What should a Left foreign policy look like?

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Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted's hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.