Yesterday, when I mentioned the student-loan provisions of HCR with regard to the reconciliation process, several of you commented, what are student-loan changes doing in the health bill anyway?

The fact is that many big bills end up with other things attached to them. A big bill that people think is going to pass is just an irresistible target for legislators: hey, that thing is going to pass, and the vote will really be about A, so if I can get a provision about B or C or D attached to it, it'll sail through cuz no one's going to vote against the whole thing just because of my little provision.

Happens all the time -- and yes, in this case, on both sides. It just so happens that student loan reform has been a big priority of the Obama administration.

Under it, private lenders will be out of the student loan business. All the lending will be issued and managed directly by the Department of Education. Proof of Obama's mad hunger to have the government control every aspect of our lives?

Either that, or a sensible response to the massive and hideous student loan scandal we've had in this country in recent years. Here's what happened in a nutshell, via the New America Foundation:

The roots of the 9.5 student loan case go back to the 1980s when Congress guaranteed non-profit lenders, which use tax-exempt bonds to finance their loans, a minimum rate of return of 9.5 percent on federal student loans made with these bonds. As interest rates on all other student loans fell in the 1990s, policymakers became concerned that these nonprofit student loan providers were making a killing. So in 1993, Congress rescinded that policy, but grandfathered in loans made from the old bonds, believing that the volume of 9.5 loans would decline as they were paid off and the bonds retired. Instead, beginning in 2002, a small group of lenders devised a strategy to aggressively grow the volume of loans that they claimed were eligible for the 9.5 guarantee. This was a goldmine for lenders in the existing low interest rate environment (at the time, the borrower interest rate on regular loans hovered around 3.5 percent.) They accomplished this scheme by transferring loans that qualified for the 9.5 subsidy payment to other financing vehicles and recycling the proceeds into new loans that they claimed were then eligible for the subsidy. The lenders repeated this process over and over again.

Crooked lenders cost taxpayers many hundreds of million dollars. And the artificial economy the loans created are considered to have added to tuition costs.

There's a moral in here about liberalism that one can never get conservatives to believe, but it's true, so, so be it. And it's this.

Believe it or not, liberals would be perfectly happy in a world where regulation weren't needed and government didn't need to run student loans. It would be great, because it would cost taxpayers less, which we're actually quite fine with, and it would mean that people in the private sector were being honest.

But that ain't the world. Polluters dump crap into rivers and the air. Employers in dangerous workplaces cut corners, resulting in death and injury. Car companies knowingly put gasoline tanks in dangerous places. Lenders rip people off.

When conservatives ask, how much regulation exactly do you advocate?, I say, no set amount -- enough to protect the public weal.

Yes, there will be problems under the new system, probably most likely to occur in the servicing realm. But it won't steal people blind.

