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Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understood my comment.

"Socialised healthcare" is a system where a public institution puts capital to take care of a patient by using private-made products and services. i.e. the needles, IT systems, ambulances, drugs, etc, the public system is a platform, but not an industry.

Let the market be free, private companies are better at solving real problems. If the price of a drug is expensive (i) a public health system will take care of it, and (ii) new players will want a slice of that expensive drug by making one better and cheaper. This is my point. Governments are not good at making realiable and quality products and services.

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Loads of things have been handed over from the government to companies within The Netherlands. Your general statement that governments are not good I highly doubt. Especially for basic services, governments seem to run them cheaper and more reliably.

Well, in the US, we have the Veterans Administration and Indian Health Service doing a poor job and wasting a lot of money and are unreliable.

Part of that failure is political. People don't want them to work because they prefer markets do it.

A great example of this in action is the silly Post Office pre pay benefit requrement. It's making the Post Office look really bad because they appear to not have enough to operate. The truth is they operate just fine, and are self-funded. Congress changed rate structures and imposed prepament of multiple decades of benefits, both of which would make no sense to any reasonable organization.

It has nothing to do with desire for markets (other than inspiring people that they work better), its the political CYA and patronage that allows people who the government has made commitments to to die. When you can kill people and not go to jail, it is beyond belief.

Actually, in the case of the Post Office, it does. The same is true for other successful government programs and services.

When you say "cheaper" you mean to partialy subsidised services. I'm refering to tollroads, train networks, healthcare, pensions, etc. What you "pay" is not the real cost, but paid for in good part by the Government's budget.

I'm pretty sure they mean 'cheaper' as in 'lower total cost including that incurred by the government' not just 'the end consumer pays less'.

It is strange that you seem to believe the free market is the only way to achieve efficiency.

From experience, yes. That's my understanding. I have worked on several transportation infrastructure projects, and now work in energy, and government-led projects (local, regional, national) tend to be more expensive (even if we include the repayment of debt) than private funded projects.

Did you not click on the link? IMO the site does a pretty good job of making it crystal clear that it's referring to the full cost (all levels of government + business + individual + other).

Sure, I did see the link to the data you provided. Unfortunately that doesn't provide the entire picture, lets not be naïve about it. US healthcare cost is not "expensive" because it is private. Some of the main reasons why it is expensive are (i) lack of pricing transparency, (ii) redudant test culture in US healthcare, (iii) lack of expenditure in preventive care vs curative, etc. This issues can be addressed without the need of nationalising any industry.

Showing just a healthcare expenditure vs GDP figure doesn't address the root cause problem, and it defiently doesn't explain that public is better than private, and vice versa. I'm not talking out of ignorance, as my father is a orthpeadic surgeon in the public healthcare system here in Europe, and the above is a logical fallacy that doctors are well aware of.

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