[jbooth]

Healthcare can indeed be pointed to as the primary cause of cost inflation in education, because, well, it is.

Don't take my word for it. Go to your local town/city hall and pull the budgets for the last decade, then scan the line items. Unless your locality has something very different going on than everywhere else, you'll see huge increases in healthcare costs and cost-cutting relative to inflation everywhere else.

[wtallis]

I think the point is that healthcare costs can't be the cause, because they are just a symptom of a broken healthcare market. The actual cost of medical supplies and doctor salaries isn't astronomical, but the price that employers and patients pay is. That disconnect, due to a lack of a sufficient combination of market forces and regulation, is what's bankrupting the country. Saying that healthcare costs are the problem is stopping short, and puts the attention where it can't actually fix things.