We’re used to hearing Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren shout about college affordability, rallying hoards of debt-ridden youth with stats of bankers’ bonuses compared to rising tuition costs.
On Wednesday, a senator of a different sort, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee weighed in on the cost of college (not for the first time). He explained that forced Medicaid expansion under Obamacare has robbed funds from public education—and state universities in particular have suffered.
Senator Alexander, a former president of the University of Tennessee and former Tennessee governor, is uniquely qualified to comment on these concerns and to forecast the adverse effects of the Affordable Care Act, as he’s done for years. The president resisted “consensus building” and pushed his healthcare mandate into action amid warnings from Alexander, chairman of the committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, that individual rates would go up under Obamacare unless some aspects, like the Medicaid expansion, were changed. Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act six years ago, premiums on individual rates in Senator Alexander’s home state of Tennessee have gone up 62 percent.
The fiscal intersection of healthcare and education funding has hounded this senator for a while. When he was governor, he made education a fiscal priority—but in so doing, “My biggest nemesis was healthcare,” he said. Thirty years ago, “the medicaid program, was eight percent of the state budget, that I was trying to keep under control. Today it’s thirty.”
In a not-quite mea culpa earlier this month, President Obama also remembered the eighties. He too blamed Medicaid expansion for rising tuition costs—just not his Medicaid expansion. At an economic town hall in Elkhart, Indiana, he answered a question about his administration’s role in rising college costs and the “student debt crisis,” by first conveniently shifting blame to the past. “What happened, around the ’80s and ’90s was state legislators started saying we’ve got to build more prisons. In fairness to them, they also started feeling more pressure because of Medicaid spending, because health care costs were going up. And so they started cutting higher education budgets. And they made up for it with higher tuition. And that’s why at least at public colleges and universities, the costs have gone up a lot.”
