Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US
However the US system. seems to create a lot if inefficiency. There is no free lunch. But a lunch where you don't throw out as much bread as you eat is more efficient.
If everyone has sanitised water it loses value.
Value is the overloaded word. We don't need to scarcity things so dollar number goes up for some elite group.
A good test is forget money and think of human collaboration. People doing things. Does it makes sense from that perspective.
Best way to scale Harvard is easy: make all the other places better (or if they are make people realise that)
Of course if you're an ignorant right wing anti-intellectual climate change and evolution denying religious fanatic, the idea of everyone having a Harvard degree is existentially terrifying for other reasons that it losing a little bit of value.