Tag: universities

Lefties at NYT decry for-profit health care institutions

~ Pharmer ~ 1 Comment

Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix – NYTimes.com.

If you’re feeling bulimic today, you can read (above) a leftist, Eduardo Porter, telling us that profit and health care don’t mix.

Health care professionals are supposed to do their work for free.   Profit is evil and the motivation for making money should not have any association with health care. How this leftie  expects to attract people to incur huge educational debt, and enter  into a very difficult field to work for nothing, is anyone’s guess.

There’s a claim in the NYT article  that a health care institution which switches from non-profit to for-profit is more likely to experience patient  deaths over subsequent two years.   The cited study admits that the shock of switching management and workers, and a myriad of other factors  could have much more to do with this effect than the mere acquisition of a profit motive. In fact, the effect of the staffing changes, and the patient mortality rate recedes after the initial shock of change.  This is a strong indicator that the mere profitability has nothing to do with the mortality rate, and that the shock of reorganization and personnel changes has everything to do with it.  The initial pressures of an institution to sell out to private investors is also discussed in the original study as a major factor.

The NYT also cites a 30 year old study of an unmentioned number of Southern Wisconsin nursing homes, and implied from the invisible data that for-profit institutions used higher doses of sedatives in their patients than the non-profits.

That the New York Times would try to convince you that health care workers and institutions should provide services for free, or at cost, is no surprise. That they would extrapolate the study results from religious affiliated non-profits, and pretend that government-run institutions would operate similarly is similarly  not a surprise.

It would, however, be a huge shock and surprise to see the leftie press calling for ABORTIONISTS to provide their services at cost, and take no profits.   There’s a fortune in abortion, and this is true for Planned Parenthood, which is excused from taxes as a supposed non-profit  (though it does make and report profit), as well as the multitudinous for-profit abortion industries. See an example of Planned Parenthood’s form 990.  Don’t ever hold your breath waiting for abortionists to be held to the same standards as real  health care providers.

You will NEVER hear a cry from the New York Times that Universities should cease to take profits,  or stop  paying their instructors and administrators well over the salaries and benefits of equally educated private sector employees.  You will never hear them ask that the salaries and benefits  of public school teachers be reduced to that of similarly educated private sector employees.

Those involved in furthering the agenda of the left will continue to reap profits and rewards well above the national average with the blessings of their media machine.  However, they won’t be satisfied until the rest of us, who provide essential goods and services, are working and living as slaves.

Is University Education Becoming a Waste?

~ Pharmer

Censorship in American Universities….

One of the interesting claims of this film is that the those with university educations live in the tightest echo chambers, while those who don’t attend university tend to have more diverse associations, and access to people with differing views.

The Student Loan Crisis

~ Pharmer

Pharmer spotted a document coming from the Campus Progress brench of the Center for American Progress on the Student Loan Crisis, and felt compelled to respond:

Our government has been selling the idea that college education is an absolute necessity, and should be accessible by everyone. Naturally this has led to an influx of students, some of whom are completely unprepared for college level classes, and who have obtained government grants and various loans to enter school. Many have absolutely no intention of repaying the loans.

All things administered and/or funded by the government will increase in price far faster than baseline inflation.
Education and healthcare are prime examples of this.

The real problem is NOT that a private lender is willing to give a loan to a student and gets the student to agree to a specific payment plan and interest rate. The true travesty is that colleges and universities are so eager to sell useless degrees and propaganda to students which are actually detrimental to their employment future. Many of the universities are willfully inculcating helplessness. Students are graduating with no job prospects in their area of training.
The problem is also not with the existence of for profit educational institutions. It is that the government is paying for unprepared students to go there, or granting loans for the same. Without this government intervention, many of the most problematic educational institutions would not have even been formed in the first place. The education bubble will pop just as the housing bubble did, because loans were made to people who could or would not repay them. This could have been stopped by requiring a significant down payment to be coming from the students themselves. The result of the education crisis will be similar to that of the housing crisis: massive loan defaults and a broken industry, with increased joblessness.

The increase in costs to the students is being blamed on reduction in government funding for educational institutions. Some people don’t realize that the debt for educational funding is passed to the students when they begin working.

The students will pay for education one way or another, by working their way through, by paying loans, and by paying the taxes which support our educational institutions with their bloated infrastructures and administrations.

The one difference is that the TAXES which will support the colleges and universities are paid by ALL tax payers including those who cannot afford to go to college. For one example, the pharmacy techs where I work, could not afford to go to college when they were young, but they are paying taxes for the children of other people to go straight through four years of college on the government dime, or on government loans which will often be defaulted. Some of the techs have slowly obtained college education as they work, and one by one, they head off into new careers.

The American people, who worked their way through higher education, and those who are still unable to do so, need to be informed that THEY ARE EXPECTED TO PAY FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS WHO THINK EDUCATION OUGHT TO BE FREE!!!!

Nothing is free.

First of all we need to understand that college education is not for everyone. More than half of people don’t have the kind of academic acumen to get through a traditional four year program. They should be encouraged (never forced) to go into a career and education program that fits their abilities, instead of being propelled towards certain failure and crippling debt.

The solution is for the educational institutions to stop building useless infrastructure which wastes energy and resources, and to fire all of their excess/useless administrators. Our higher education has to be leaner and more cost effective. Too much of it is run by greedy, money grubbing, frequently leftist 1%-ers who need to be replaced by those who know where money comes from, and would be wise stewards of whatever funding comes their way. When these changes come about, the cost of education to students and to the tax payers will drop.

Currently there are private programs which pay grants to students to NOT go to traditional colleges, and go straight into industry. It’s an awesome experiment and may serve to tap the creativity of young people before the universities suck it out of them. Cultural education is being moved out of the universities and housed in on-line resources. Testing and internships or apprenticeships, have been added as university requirements to enter more and more professions which require high skill. This is evinces the failure of universities to provide the necessary preparation for real world opportunities. This provides a strong impetus for higher education to be “homeschooled” and obtained online.

In short, our creativity and inventiveness will only be preserved to the extent that we can escape governmental control of our access to educational resources and opportunities.