This story is several days old. But I wanted to go back and show how, after a pack of lobbyists killed one attempt to get government to use its power to save money and improve health care, another pack of lobbyists are trying to do the same with higher education.
Eric Lichtblau (who, IMO, does much better at digging out DOJ scandals than reporting legislative battles) describes how the plan to replace privatized student loans–in which the government guarantees student loans that lenders then repackage and profit off of–with direct loans form the government is in political trouble.
But an aggressive lobbying campaign by the nation’s biggest student lenders has now put one of the White House’s signature plans in peril, with lenders using sit-downs with lawmakers, town-hall-style meetings and petition drives to plead their case and stay in business.
House and Senate aides say that the administration’s plan faces a far tougher fight than it did last fall, when the House passed its version. The fierce attacks from the lending industry, the Massachusetts election that cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and the fight over a health care bill have all damaged the chances for the student loan measure, said the aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The effort to return to using direct loans to students rather than using government guarantees to support student loans stems from a series of scandals under the Bush Administration. Loan companies gave school administrators kick-backs to make their loans preferred at the schools, regardless of whether those loans made sense for the students. Lenders manipulated a subsidy (and churned some loans) to take advantage of a 9.5% profit guarantee that they weren’t otherwise entitled to. And, given a revolving door between the industry and DOE, students had little protection against fraud. As a result, students were paying far more than they should have for loans, and when they ultimately faced default, they had far fewer options for getting out of that debt assumed under what were basically fraudulent conditions.
By passing government-backed loans through private companies rather than lending money directly, students became captive consumers to an industry with little real competition and even less protection against fraud. The whole scheme turned college education from a necessary step to achieve a middle class lifestyle (and more broadly, to keep America competitive internationally) into a mere profit center for the finance industry.
The legislation before the Senate would curtail that system, replace a corporate welfare program, and use the savings to support the same number of loans plus many more education programs.
The money that would be saved by cutting out the private-industry middlemen — about $80 billion over the next decade, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis — could instead go toward expanding direct Pell Grants to students, establishing $10,000 tax credits for families with loans, and forgiving debts eventually for students who go into public service, administration officials say.
The bill would also shift tens of billions of dollars in expected savings to early learning programs, community colleges and the modernization of public school facilities.
So back to my parallel with the battle over the public option.
The choices now being made in health care risk making the same mistake we’ve made in the student loan industry. Captive consumers will be asked to support higher overhead (20% or more, in the case of the Senate bill) without adequate regulatory controls to make sure those consumers get the health care they’re paying for in return. A public option would have served as one check on this system by offering consumers one option that didn’t include that 20% overhead that also benefited from more direct government oversight. It would have saved $100 billion–in the same neighborhood of savings we’ll get by reverting the student loans to direct government assistance. But corporatist Senators like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman killed that plan, and as a result, we have to hope (assuming a bill passes at all) the HHS Secretary proves better at regulating a powerful industry than the Secretary of Education under Bush.
And now, having seen how easy it was to kill the public option, a solution that would save the government money and better achieve the underlying goal–health care (as distinct from insurance)–some of the very same corporatist Senators are turning their sights on direct student loans.
Read more →
ThinkProgress has an absolutely