Paul Ryan has laid out a pretty good blueprint for medicare and medicaid, and many have espoused good solutions on health care in general. Open up more competition, fix regulations to allow more catastrophic insurance options, medical savings accounts. Governors like Mitch Daniels have done a lot on Indiana to lower costs and and expand coverage. Also, in my opinion the key is decoupling employment and health care. Offer individual the same tax benefits companies get...fully deductible. Individuals and families should be able to select their own insurance programs that are not reliant on a particular job. Much of the pre-existing condition problems would be addressed by this simple change.
For education, there is more than can be covered quickly here. There are plenty of resources out there. The bottom line is it is a state issue, not national and the less the federal government does, the better. The Department of Education has been around for only 40 years, and education has steadily declined ever since. This may be correlation or causation, and probably a little of both. Schools need to refocus on the core curriculum and cut the extras. Be very good at whatever is most important to preparing kids for the real world. I am sure Heritage and other sites would offer some more.
Milton Friedman made the point that insurance is to protect only against catastrophic events that are unlikely to occur, but health insurance is used to cover everything..it would be like car insurance paying for the gas and an oil change. Ryan has a good proposal to tweak entitlements, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental nature of dependency on the government and we know the effects of government subsidies because the U.S. Goverment spends more on health care per citizen than France, Britain, and other nations. It will always strain supply when you artificially increase demand when others people foot the expense.
I cannot believe the federal government can continue to throw billions at education and despite failure over decades, the solution is always more money with more failure. At some point politicans have to admit they have failed and stay out of it. I’m concerned by the cultural impact as well.