The problem is health insurance.
Having someone else pay your bill at the doctor's office cuts off the patient-consumer from pricing information.
Any market exchange where the consumer does not have accurate pricing information is grossly inefficient.
This is basic Econ people.
If you send me to the store to buy groceries where nothing had a price on it and tell me that someone else will pick up the bill I'm spending a lot more money than if I knew the prices and paid the bill myself.

Duh!

Whole Foods does it right.
They give their employees catastrophic medical coverage with a high deductible and health savings accounts.
This would work so much better than Obamacare, but of course it would eliminate the need for the Big Welfare State, and if people find out they don't need the Big Welfare State for one part of their life they will begin to question the intrusion of the Big Welfare State in other parts of their lives, and then God forbid they will reject the fiscally unsustainable model of the Big Welfare State all together because they will have the epiphany that they can run their lives better than some bureaucrat in Washington D.C. can.

Duh!

Ignoring wellenss care is stupid, TC. Let me ask, who puts the money in the FSA at Whole Foods? The employees do (it's pretax and there'd be no need for it to be an FSA if they weren't contributing) so Whoel Foods has a high deductible the employees have to pay then only covers them if a disaster happens so the employees are fucked if they come down with diabetes or cancer or some other disease that isn't a catastrophic accident. *And* they can't get wellenss coverage so have to pay out the nose just to go to the doctor to stay healthy, which has proven to be a reason people don't go to begin with. That's just plain fucking stupid.

I have a reasonable plan: $1000 per person, $2000 per household deductible *plus* prescription coverage and no deductible on typical doctor's visits (i.e. wellness visits), just a copay. I do have to pay for lab work out of the deductible however, but that's fine as it means my deductible will already be partially covered if something puts me or my wife in the hospital. *That's* a decent plan. You *must* account for and cover wellness or our nation will get sicker and sicker.

Tettleman: your experience in administration is COMPLETELY irrelevant to the fact that (depending on when you graduated) you paid tuition that was 50-75% less than the average state university tuition. but it is good to know at you're so thankful for the leg up the rest of the state gave you!

Your all stupid yay

*You're

yaxay, you are absolutely mistaken, but if you can't see that administration is subsidized by the state budget and not student tuition there isn't any hope for you.
I've always been unimpressed by people who can't figure out simple things.
Like you for example.

The proof of my point is do you see any administration getting laid off in the UC or CSUN systems?
You hear about part time faculty being let go.
You hear about reduced enrollment.
You hear about rising tuition.
You don't hear a word about administrative cuts backs.
That's because the campuses exist for the administrators now days.
There are 3 administrators for every two full-time faculty members.
These ratios aren't reduced by the cut backs in California education.
The campuses exist for the administrators, not for the students.
That is a corruption of the education system, but with idiots who are too lazy or too stupid to simply look at the facts what can you do.
You just realize they are dumber than dirt and move on with your life.

@Tettleton:
Patients make horrible consumers, because the incentives to stay healthy far outweigh the costs of ordering more tests and more procedures. It doesn't matter how well the "consumer" is informed, they're still going to do more than is "optimal", because GODDAMN IT I'M SICK AND I WANT TO BE HEALTHY!
Insurance companies have a greater incentive to keep costs down precisely because they're third parties. Of course, they will fail to keep costs down if they can find a way to pass the cost to the consumer instead.

It's true that, if people payed for their own healthcare, they'd use less, but that's because they'd run out of money, not because they are better at managing costs. Consumers also lack bargaining power to control health-care providers.

Bureaucracy does not have a monopoly on inefficiency.

tettleton, you're really quite poor at throwing insults. I would refrain from doing it if I were you.

i happen to agree with your assessment of the administration's shameful takeover of the UC and CSU systems.

however, the fact remains that YOUR tuition was a particular dollar amount when you paid it. And that dollar amount was determined ENTIRELY by the state of California's education budget. Just because the administrators chose to spend the money poorly doesnt change the fact that the end cost to you, the consumer, was FAR BEYOND cheap. and the reasoit was cheap is because the government mae it that way.

Mosh, You first sentence doesn't make any sense to me. I'm dense.
Please explain how patients make horrible customers more clearly because your explanation is ambiguous.

I will offer you this evidence to contradict your claim.
Here is a website called "Treatment Abroad" where individuals can compare by price the cost of procedures.
Insurance companies contract with facilities and do not have the flexibility that individual patients do.
That's why your insurance charges you extra for going outside its net of contracting hospitals and doctors.
Now how that is more efficient and how individual patients are less efficient escapes me and your ambiguous explanation doesn't make this any clearer.

All I can tell you is that if patients know the cost of tests and procedures they will shop around just like the do for anything else.

Patients who want elective surgery not covered by insurance shop around to the point that the cost of breast implants and lasix surgeries not covered by most insurance have decreased in price because of price competition between providers.

Now will consumers decide on surgery just because of price? Doubtful. I don't hire the contractor with the cheapest bid, usually. I want the best value.
Don't you want the best value Mosh?
No one surpasses the patient's ability to determine value in my judgement.

Mosh, what *are* you talking about? That makes no sense whatsoever. You're saying, in essence, that because demand is so high, consumers, who are making the demand, force things to be non-optimal...

Yet basic economic law says that "optimum" is determined by supply and *demand*. That's kind of the entire point of economics. You can't say because demand is so high, the system isn't operating at equilibrium. That makes absolutely no sense.

That being said, I'm sure whatever Tettleton said was 8 billion times worse.

My tuition costs were determined by the amount of money taken out of the state's education budget to pay for administrative costs first. Just as administrative costs are the first cost concern in the budget today.
The proof of this is the fact that administrators aren't getting laid off, but tuition is going up.
Administration is subsidized not tuition.
You keep making claims with no logical argument whatsoever behind them.
Administration does't choose tuition rates. The board of regents do.
Do you not know how tuition is set in the UC and CSU systems.
Have you ever worked in either the UC or CSU systems.
Do you even live in California.
Because really your posts sound like you are simply reprinting the same old lines from Welfare State advocates that are so easily refuted, just as I've done here.
So please post correct statements and ones that aren't so easily refuted.

Yax, if you want to see which costs are subsidized in an institutional model look at the costs that "don't" change.
It a basic concept of analysis.

hm.. maybe your education wasn't so world class. your arguments are pretty hard to follow, and contain very little evidence of logical reasoning.

i have already acknowledged that the administrators take far too much of the education budget. this fact MOST CERTAINLY raises the tuition costs for students. But i am not talking about that. In a perfect world, your tuition would have been lower, because the greedy admins wouldn't have wasted so much money on themselves.

But, the fact remains that it was still DIRT CHEAP, compared with other universities. i'd like to have seen you work your way through college attending a comparable private university, like USC or Stanford. do you think you could have funded it yourself, unencumbered by long term debt, on $40K/yr? I think not.

It's ok, you can continue to be ungrateful. I'm just sad the education was wasted on someone who is clearly incapable of using it.

Yax, I guess only you know what you are talking about, but the point remains that in the current budget fiasco in California tuition is going up and administrators are not being laid off to cut costs. Part-time faculty are being eliminated in departments throughout the system.
So neither part-time faculty or tuition is being subsidized, but administrative staffs, salaries, and benefits are.

I guess you need a straw man to argue with since you posted I'm ungrateful for my education when that isn't the case.

Feel free to make up whatever you want. You seem to have an unlimited talent to fabricate.

you're ungrateful for the gift your fellow Californian taxpayers gave you - a cheap, world class education. and that is no fabrication.

Teaching assistants and large lecture halls aren't the hallmarks of a world class education. Again, you're familiarity with UCLA is lacking. As far as taxpayer help I'm grateful to the US Army matching my contributions to my college fund while I was on active duty, but they got off cheap considering. At least I was in after Vietnam and before the Gulf War. One of those rare little windows of peace in the 20th century.

Yax, following the line of your hollow rhetoric that anyone and everyone who ever graduated from a UC or CSU school owes the taxpayers forever what about the failures of government? What about the corruption, the failed programs, etc. Where do I get my refund for that under your rhetorical framework?