do you believe the state should pay for the health care of those who cannot afford to pay?
Depends on the reason they cannot afford to pay.
If someone has a genuine disability, then the State should pay, but I do not believe that the State should pay for people who are capable and able to work, but choose not to. People have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for their circumstances. In most cases when you talk about paying for health care, you are really asking the question as to whether or not health insurance should be paid for. Its easy to state that very few people could pay for a complex operation costing €100,000's, its less easy to argue that very few people could pay a few hundred euro per annum for the insurance policy that would pay for such an operation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
csirl http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?p=651004#post651004
People make out healthcare to be to complex and difficult to be run by the private sector. The reality is that a lot of the major public service hospitals in Ireland ARE private sector owned (Beaumont, St. Vincents, St James, Mater), so this statement has been disproven.
And according to anyone who asks not very efficently.
Precisely - due to having a monopoly/cartel. Do you not think that these hospitals would up their game if they faced the prospect of losing their public sector contracts to a competitor if they did not improve?
You see the proviision of health as a market place where the rules of profit and loss etc applies. If you dont then your not really talking about privatision in the sence I unnderstand it. In a privatised system, privately owned health care providers will charge insurance companies for services and insurance companies will levy the cost of this onto consumer in terms of policies.
2 points:
1. There are many forms of privatisation, some of which may be more suitable and efficient than the one you describe.
2. It may surprise you, but whether public or privately funded, economics do apply to healthcare. You argue that a private sector organisation may determine that it is not worth offering a particular service because it costs too much. A public sector organisation e.g. HSE, Dept of Finance, may also make the same decision and seem to be doing so with increasing frequency as the economy slows down. Public health is not immune from being shut down for budgetary reasons as the 1980s would prove. The public service always has to balance the additional charge to be passed onto the taxpayer in the form of higher taxes against the benefit of providing the service.
However you do not see that monolopies do not have to exist within the public sector. there can be competition between hospitals in the public sector. Along much of the saME CRITERIA that you are suggesting. the difference being that the ultimate motivation is making patients better not making profit.
If you were going to get the same pay regardless of how hard you worked and you could never lose your job, what motivation do you have to work harder? Answer: None. This is just ideological claptrap - it goes entirely against human nature to suggest that people would go out of their way to work harder for no reward.
The only way you can have genuine competition between hospitals delivering public services is if those who are not up to scratch lose their jobs - this can only be achieved by competition with real benefits for those who perform well i.e. increased profits, and real penalties for those who dont i.e. no profits, job losses etc.
