The parallels in both cases are that service providers have no incentive to hold costs down, because the costs are not directly borne by the consumer or are delayed.
Providers charge whatever they want, because they know you really don't have a choice and that insurance is picking up the bill, and if insurance won't pay you can go after the patient. Patients don't have any way to price shop (it's usually impossible to know the cost of a procedure or service before you get it, nor what will really be covered by insurance) and are insulated from most of the costs by their insurance.
In education, a huge chunk of the tab is covered by loans, which makes students price-insensitive, and the institution has no real incentive to hold costs down, in fact they actually use the fancy rec center and stadium to attract students. They can also run up the gen-ed courseload to artificially increase the amount of time it takes to graduate. Students have no real flexibility here either, because it's not like you can take a class at another university because it's too much, or choose to pass on a gen-ed.
The sad truth about healthcare is there's just too many middlemen all taking their cut and it all adds up. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors all need to make their cut, and by the time the service is delivered it's extremely expensive. Most other countries impose a lot more price controls, reduce the number of middlemen, and provide doctors with free education to increase the supply and remove the need to repay their own steep student loans (iirc you are looking at about $400k these days). Fixing the problem involves taking on a number of very powerful lobbying groups at the same time and is going to piss off a lot of people whose gravy-train would come to an end.
In schools, the problem largely comes down to reducing the amount of administrators and reducing the spend on non-essential facilities (rec center, stadium, etc). The actual teachers themselves are usually overworked and underpaid, the money is disappearing at an institution/administration level.
Example that comes to mind: my alma mater tore down a building that contained english/math classrooms and lecture halls, and replaced it the year I graduated. The basic requirements of an english/math classroom or a large lecture hall have not fundamentally changed in the last 100 years, they may have added projector screens but it's still fundamentally a room that people sit in and receive instruction, and there was no real need to replace it besides "we could".
The university did put forward that it would save them $300k per year in energy costs, which means that at the cost of $69 million it'll only take them 210 years to make their money back.
Providers charge whatever they want, because they know you really don't have a choice and that insurance is picking up the bill, and if insurance won't pay you can go after the patient. Patients don't have any way to price shop (it's usually impossible to know the cost of a procedure or service before you get it, nor what will really be covered by insurance) and are insulated from most of the costs by their insurance.
In education, a huge chunk of the tab is covered by loans, which makes students price-insensitive, and the institution has no real incentive to hold costs down, in fact they actually use the fancy rec center and stadium to attract students. They can also run up the gen-ed courseload to artificially increase the amount of time it takes to graduate. Students have no real flexibility here either, because it's not like you can take a class at another university because it's too much, or choose to pass on a gen-ed.
The sad truth about healthcare is there's just too many middlemen all taking their cut and it all adds up. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors all need to make their cut, and by the time the service is delivered it's extremely expensive. Most other countries impose a lot more price controls, reduce the number of middlemen, and provide doctors with free education to increase the supply and remove the need to repay their own steep student loans (iirc you are looking at about $400k these days). Fixing the problem involves taking on a number of very powerful lobbying groups at the same time and is going to piss off a lot of people whose gravy-train would come to an end.
In schools, the problem largely comes down to reducing the amount of administrators and reducing the spend on non-essential facilities (rec center, stadium, etc). The actual teachers themselves are usually overworked and underpaid, the money is disappearing at an institution/administration level.