mrstickball said:
Squilliam said:
The reason why socialised health care is cheaper is that you have a monopsony (single buyer) of health care. If you want to practice in a socialised system you effectively need to sell your service to the government and as a monopsony it has the ability to pay less than what the market price may have otherwise been. On the other hand if you have large private companies with an imperitive to increase profits year after year, they'll have an incentive to not only charge more but also try to influence regulation in their favour as well.
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Depends on what kind of regulations the monosopy can force onto the providers. In the US, Medicare is a partial monsopy. They pay for a significant part of US health care. Because of that, they've driven up, not driven down, costs because everything is tied to what they are willing to pay out. Its created gross inefficiencies as some providers peg their prices to whatever the government will pay, which distorts the true price of health care.
Additionally, the kinds of compliance as given by mediare (e.g. "Fill out these 500 papers detailing how you provided a pill to aunt Sally") have driven up costs as well. Its another one of those "Great in theory, horrible in practice" arguments.
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That is more bad practice than anything which is inherrently wrong with government departments, healthcare inclusive. Maybe you're jaded by the fact that government departments where you live aren't efficient at all. Where I'm from the government is efficient, lean and often as effective as any private company of equivalent size. It is possible to have public services provided in a fashion similar to private companies, afterall I live in a country where corporatisation was a big movement many years ago and has paid dividends, even our postal service is profitable.
