Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.

Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.

Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!

That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.

>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!

I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.

I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.

Americans earn more than Swiss people after taxes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

And after paying insurance?

To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance through my job, this comes out of my pre-taxed income. While I won't get into specifics on the details of the terms, I am quite happy with it.

I work in Massachusetts, but I live in New Hampshire. I pay more than double this on both Social Security fees & Massachusetts income taxes, which are non-deductible since New Hampshire has no income tax and makes up for that with higher property taxes (housing is cheaper though). Filtered to just health related services I can easily identify, in total I pay for Social Security, Medicare, and indirectly Massachusett's state healthcare (which I can only gain access to under limited conditions). Of these, only the private insurance fee directly benefits me, and I have little faith social security will actually pay out when I reach the qualifying age.

In terms of investment my HSA, and 401k are a much better dollar for dollar investment for my future finances than any government service, so I find it extremely unlikely I would ever truly benefit from public healthcare.

Despite my tone here, I'm more annoyed than upset about this. Due to the overall societal benefit, I'm not entirely against public healthcare depending on the details, I'm just under no illusion that it would be to my benefit, and I'm not much of an outlier. I'm also mostly convinced the root issue here is the inflated cost of healthcare rather than just the insurance aspect, public healthcare naively implemented would likely turn into yet another government subsidy for hospitals to devour imo.

> To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance

Having just filled my annual benefits selections tonight, here's my data point: health insurance is $3000/month on the company plan (36K/year).

Yes, the company "pays" for a percentage of that. But of course the entire $3K/month is part of my total compensation cost to the company. If healthcare wasn't so ludicrously expensive in the US, they could afford to pay me more, instead of funneling all this money to insurance company profits.

Insurance companies don’t actually make very much profit. I don’t recall the exact number, but something like 80-90% of premiums taken in are paid out in claims. Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.