- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
Frankly your arguments hold no water whatsoever.
Then it shouldn't be a problem for you to directly engage my arguments and disprove them in point form.
for example how do you refute that selling the infrastructure to our health system to a for profit corporation will solve the shortage of doctors, and lack of funds, while remaining a viable business without cutting services and/or increasing costs to the end users.
to do this you will have to prove that the existing administrative overhead is more costly and complicated than dealing with several separate insurance companies, several different coverage levels all tacking on an extra 15% for their shareholders.
Simply looking at how other industries work in socialist nations vs capitalist or free market nations demonstrates the point conclusively; yes milk and rice may be very cheap in Venezuela or Zimbabwe, but this is moot if there is none in the stores.
Crown Corps and a Government Department that controls resources are two very different things. Simply looking at a socialist nation and saying see governments can't run things, is comparing apples to oranges.
First many of those countries have very high levels of socially acceptable corruption.
Second, none of those are crown corporations, they are government departments, a crown corporation functions like a private corporation, except that the shareholders (the people) extract their ROI from services offered and/or reduction in taxes.
Similarly, if higher levels of State ownership and interference intrude in the health care business, the nominal price may be lower, but the long wait times and poor service (and higher death toll as people simply are not treated for debilitating conditions in a timely or effective manner) simply substitute for monetary costs, and legions of sick people waiting for treatment are a drain on the productivity of whatever industry they work for.
exactly what state interference is resulting in a doctor shortage other than not enough funds... how many doctors are protesting that they have to treat all patients regardless of their personal worth... how many hospitals are complaining that the government is not letting enough private industry in their field?
A company might be notionally private (like Government Motors), but if they have been receiving large government subsidies in the form of (never repaid) loans, grants, single source contracts etc. then they are indeed no better than Crown corporations. As for the idea of a "public purse", there is no such thing: that is my money going to political rent seekers.
If a crown corp. turns a profit of 1 million dollars, and they don't just credit most of that to their customer's accounts (give it back to the constituents) like Sasktel does, they would then transfer that over to the government coffers.
At that point it can be reinvested into infrastructure, used to pay down the governments debt, increase other services, I see that as the public purse... are you implying that politicians just pocket the money?
What exactly is a political rent seeker? I fail to see why filling a job position in the public office is somehow negative; administrators are required, private or public. Politicians will spend tax dollars on pet projects; however it's up to the people to vote them in and out based on their behaviour.
I freely consent to paying for protection, and any government that limited itself to things like the police, EMS, military and courts of law would be a far better and more effective steward of the public purse (and create far more economic opportunity) than what we have today.
Private businesses fail all the time, we blame the executives responsible, when a crown corp. fails, some people blame socialism. Every crown corporation that I've heard of that has been privatized has become less effective and/or more expensive.
Provide me with an example of privatization of an entire crown corp. that has been a success, because I can't find one.
Bottled water is a private business sector, municipal water is largely government, yet bottled water is frequently no better and sometimes worse than municipal water.
Municipalities that have privatized their water supply have had increased outages and decreased service and quality because the private firm needs to turn a profit, and there just isn't enough fat in those departments, so they turn up the water pressure to deliberately blow weaker pipes to create more revenue through their maintenance contracts.
WRT the poor, they have been sustained for centuries by private and institutional (i.e. church) charity (and even today many people who need medical attention benefit from these charities, as I well know being involved myself); nothing stops you from getting out the door and helping people......
WRT the poor until the last century they were allowed to die without care, starve to death or were imprisoned if they couldn't pay their bills. Many of them could not get access to properly trained doctors and instead relied on folk medicine as their only resort. This is why things like the Flu became pandemics that killed large swathes of the population.
Nothing stops me from going out the door to help them no, but saying let the poor survive on the kindness of strangers, after saying you think that you have more right to healthcare than they do because you make more money is a ridiculous concept.
Especially a large portion of low paying jobs come with an elevated risk of injury and sickness. Those jobs need to be done, someone has to do it. We relegate them to the people who can't or won't do anything else, it's only fair we provide them with protection from criminals, natural disasters, and disease.
Just because someone doesn't have the ambition or desire to obtain a position that has higher social status than a lower paying job doesn't mean they shouldn't have access to decent medical care.
Yeah the garbage man probably didn't pay attention in school, and dropped out, but if he stops picking up your garbage cause everyone is working white collar jobs now, you are screwed.
You need him, you can't live as you are without him, and relegating him to suffer without treatment for something that knows no social boundaries because you feel he's not worth protecting because he hasn't conformed to your standards it is a very selfish attitude.
Because no matter what the bar is set to, no matter what standards are met, someone will have to pick up the garbage, fix the sewers, dig ditches, and serve in the military.
Remember, as a service member, some of our fellow citizens feel we are nothing more than welfare in uniforms (fewer these days), how would you feel if they were entitled to decide if you should have access to health care?
If we start taking healthcare away from people based on their perceived social stature, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine our access being denied due to costs.
I can hear it now "They volunteered, why should we pay for their healthcare? so what if they can't afford procedures that cost half of their yearly gross pay, they should have picked a better career, it's not my problem, they should look to charity for help"