Gongol.com Archives: June 2026
June 29, 2026
Two stories are never, ever leaving the news
The University of Nebraska is a partner in a large health system called Nebraska Medicine, and they're in the messy process of separating from one partner institution and adding another. But behind the story, there are two issues that are never, ever leaving the news: Funding for higher education and funding for health care. ■ Anyone who wants to understand why both stories are going to come back perpetually, "Groundhog Day"-style, needs to read William Baumol's book "The Cost Disease". Right behind death and taxes comes the certainty that higher education and health care budgets will remain large, growing, and contentious from now until the end of foreseeable time. ■ To condense the argument to its essence, demand for both health care and education seems poised to grow indefinitely. Meanwhile, the supply of each is tightly constrained by the need for lots of human-centered, person-to-person interactions, from diagnostic counseling to reading stories written by second-graders. Unless a substantial number of patients want to sign up for do-it-yourself blood draws or emptying their own hospital bedpans, these constraints are inevitable. ■ On the surface, it's a little grim to say, "These problems are both intractable and virtually certain to get worse with every passing week", but it's much worse to approach them as if they are solvable in the sense of "If we just apply enough brainpower and effort, we can find a permanent answer". ■ The problem is that both health care and education are hugely influenced by public policy and public funding, which invariably draws them into an arena of discussion where patience, strategic thinking, long-term viewpoints are especially hard to sustain. This means every resulting policy discussion is more or less bound to involve wishful thinking, impossible promises, and frothy arguments among highly interested parties. And that's exceptionally unlikely to change in anyone's lifetime today, even when all parties involved are of good character and mutual goodwill.
With the layoff of its long-time morning show host, "WMT Radio in Cedar Rapids has lost the last of its local on-air staff after more than 100 years on the air." Incompetent, uninterested ownership has devastated the condition of hundreds of radio stations across the United States. It's not just absentee ownership in the abstract sense, it has become absentee-managed and absentee-programmed, as well. The FCC still requires, at least nominally, that broadcasting serve the "public interest, convenience, or necessity". It is long past time for some enforcement of that principle. Terminate the licenses of the reckless rentiers who have extracted every last drop of value from once-proud institutions that were protected from competition by explicit government regulation. Make them surrender those licenses (for cause) and turn them over to operators whose first interest is, in fact, the local public.
