Is child care/daycare innately expensive? What can society do to reduce *cost* of it?

I was reading a long article today about NYC’s plan to essentially cover 100% of the costs for families with young children. Long story short: it would be a massive undertaking that would require either steep budget cuts in other areas of govt, or hefty tax increases. The reason being: daycare is so expensive in America, that you can’t “solve” it by shifting who pays the sticker price. Whether the govt pays or the parents pay, the sticker prices stay exorbitant.

I have been trying to think of policy ways to actually reduce the *cost* of daycare (cost and price are different things).

Is there anything that can be done to actually reduce costs of the service? Typically, costs go down in an economy when supply increases. Supply increases can stem from productivity gains or from literally an increase in the number of people providing a service.


Daycare is weird though. Daycare workers are *not* highly paid, and owners of daycares don’t really make that much money, when you factor in ratio laws. If some woman at her house provides daycare for 8 kids, it is possible for the costs paid by each parent to be insanely high, but the income of the daycare provider to not be much more than typical middle class.


One way I guess is to increase the allowed ratio of child:daycare worker.


Idk, what does the OT think? Is daycare just one of those things that, due to the Econ forces, just can’t be cheap?