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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

What bad things?

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/pittsburgh-flint-veolia-...

Thanks. That looks perhaps like an instance of what the grand-father comment described:

> I mean, it's on-brand; if the USA has bad things from too much privatization, it's poetic for the solution to be more privatization.

The municipality of Flint that's mentioned in the article still was in charge of providing water. They just outsourced parts of that duty. More privatisation might have helped. Who knows?

How though? By making concurrent pipes companies? How many for an unregulated free market? 8? 10?

Why do you need concurrent pipes?

I think his point is that markets work through competition. If we have 10 different companies running pipes to every home in Flint, all run by separate companies, then we might be set. But with one, market mechanisms don't work, so a market fundamentalist ideology leads to bad outcomes.

The US is basically like a third world country that accidentally became very rich.[0] What bad things?

[0] Yes, I know that was a crazy hand-wave over History...

> The US is basically like a third world country that accidentally became very rich.

Yeah, yeah. We've all heard the popular Dutch idiom. Repeating it ad infinitum doesn't make it true.

Atleast the Dutch are aware enough of 1860s-1990s history to leave out the "accidentally became" part.

Medical bankruptcies.

The healthcare sector is one of the most regulated and least private in the US.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

I like the NHS.

Very approximately, Americans spends about 20% of their GDP on healthcare. Britain spends about 10%. Singapore spends about 5%. (Those numbers include both government spending, like on the NHS or US Medicare and private spending.)

The NHS looks good compared to the broken American system. But it's a spendthrift compared to Singapore.

Healthcare outcomes in Singapore are no worse than in the US or UK.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore for more information.

I don't think you included out of pocket payments for Singapore, but you have for England.

I rounded heavily, instead of looking it up. Blame laziness.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2... has the numbers. Picking 2019 to avoid covid's effects you get:

US: 16.68%

UK: 9.87%

Singapore: 4.42%

The world bank also has data to show private vs public health expenditure.

Meaning subject to the most regulatory capture and infected layers of parasites

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