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Showing posts from March, 2015

Healthcare, Degrees, and Creative Destruction

Health care is expensive, as Steven Brill sometimes writes, because scans, labs, doctors, pills, etc cost too much. As simple as that sounds, it is surprisingly akin to what ails university training in today’s America. Kevin Carey writes in his new book, “The End of College,” that we have astronomical projections of future college costs due to the place that university training occupies in today’s market, that of a monopoly. Want a degree in Bioengineering so that you can get an entry level job at the NIH? Well, you’re likely--very likely--to need a degree at some university, and the more elite (more expensive) the university the better, in order to make yourself stand out from your peers. There is only one place to get a degree: a college. Likewise, in our health care system, there are only certain providers that are able to provide a diagnosis (apart from Google and WebMD). It is likely--highly likely--that a hospital will be involved. Just like in our university model, there is b