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Comment by MaulingMonkey | Hacker News Reader

How does shifting the burden from a profit-motivated company to a hell-if-I-know-by-what-motivated government bureaucracy guarantee anything?

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Because countries with public health care spend less on health care. Its fine if you have a moral disagreement with having a public sector, but the facts don't lie, the health insurance bureaucracy, misleading pharmaceutical marketing/sales etc, is way more inefficient than even the shittiest implementation of a public healthcare system.

> hell-if-I-know-by-what-motivated government bureaucracy

If I have to decide between a company which is guaranteed to not be motivated by my well-being and a government which is at least partially motivated by that (unfornately only partially due to issues[1]) I know what to choose.

[1] Mainly lobbyism and greed. Where people are there is greed, where there's greed there's potential for misbehaviour.

> If I have to decide between a company which is guaranteed to not be motivated by my well-being

False premise. The dead can't buy their products, and the so much as merely pissed off will be motivated to take their business to the competition. Both of these hurt profit.

> and a government which is at least partially motivated by that

What do you base this on? The warm fuzzy feelings by bureaucrats? Employees are people too, with their own fuzzy warm feelings. What makes government employees special?

The fact that their job security is dependent on who we elect to public office.

Politicians are motivated by power, not by your needs. We have had repeated examples of just how bad states truly are at providing for people's basic needs. Every time it's been tried, it's resulted in chronic shortages, often to the point of starvation. The USSR, Cuba, North Korea, China (before they went capitalist). I'm going to take a wager and say that the days when the USSR was still a major world power were before your time, and if I'm right, I strongly encourage you to do some reading on what it was like for the people who lived in it.

Government provides many basic needs in the U.S., from roads to airports to sanitation to education to security (police, fire, and military); to food, water, shelter and healthcare for the needy; to justice, to much more.

These services generally function relatively well in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

And yet we still have states, and they still provide basic services (e.g. roads, water, waste disposal). Why is that? If they were as useless as you think they are we would have removed them a long time ago. Maybe there's still something useful in them?

Regarding your point of reading up on USSR etc.: I've talked with people who lived in these countries at that time, thanks. They don't see it as black and white as you do. Which kind of makes my point.

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