Comment by p-e-w
21 hours ago
Because between the 1970s and 1990s, Western nations decided that private operations should be the default for everything except where the law specifically requires state institutions, instead of the other way round.
In many countries, essential services like hospitals, drinking water supply, airport security, schools, even prisons are now partially or fully privatized. It seems insane when you think about it, but that’s what your grandparents voted for.
How would this work the other way around? The state provides cheeseburgers and fidget spinners until someone writes a law requiring private industry to provide these things? Isn't there a sort of lack of freedom inherent in forcing people to get all their cheeseburgers from a single place?
The other way around would be having public options except where explicitly forbidden. The existence of a public option does not forbid private options. For example the existence of the USPS does not forbid UPS or Fedex or Amazon from operating delivery services, which may be preferable for many customers. But the public option guarantees that a certain level of service is available to anyone and makes it impossible for any private entity to secure a monopoly. It also is very sensible in cases of natural monopoly (power plants, international airports, prisons, wastewater treatment centers) where there's never going to be any meaningful competition that the government should own and operate the monopoly.
Yes, but there's also a lack of freedom inherent in denying people healthcare and other public services because they can't afford them.
Government is fundamental. Business is art.
yeah that probably isn't what they actually meant, obviously
I wonder if who owns it is a red herring, but routing out corruption and bad incentives is the key.
Government runs anything that regulation alone cant make safe.
Ukraine an interesting moment with the recent (as in less than 10 years ago) health reform. The change was not in the ownership regime, but in funding (preallicated fixed amount vs post payment for itemised coded services).
Once the incetives got changed, a lot of doctors opened up their own practices as PE. The government still foots the bill, but the corrupt middleman of the local variety got cut from the flow
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What is the appropriate level of safety? Safety is a spectrum, not a binary condition. Privately owned commercial airlines operating under strict government regulation seem to be pretty safe.
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Private is the default solution for all problems. The state only provides a service when the government takes action to do so, and usually this is on top of whatever existing private infrastructure there is.
This seems like a pretty weird perspective to have?
A mix of public and private can work with proper regulation (especially when combined with state owned private companies).
This article only refers to the US. This is the second time I've brought it up over the last week, but it'd be nice if the US and "the west" weren't constantly conflated.
Not all of us have fucked over their citizens and spiraled into borderline dictatorships that are well on their way to becoming international pariahs as much as the US have.
Everything suddenly makes a lot more sense once you realize the US is a developing country, one that happens to control the global money printer (due to a few accidents of history).
It's the only developing country that is also "first-world" or "western", and unfortunately, also the most powerful of those.
> It seems insane when you think about it, but that’s what your grandparents voted for.
Our grandparents wanted a nice hospital and that's what they voted for. The people they elected needed funds to build the hospital, so they sought funding. The IMF and World Bank said "sure, we'll help you fund it. But in order to do so, you need to privatize your healthcare industry."
Our grandparents got a nice hospital for a while, the politicians got another 4 years in power, and a few years later we noticed that our free healthcare was gone.
This, multiplied across the entire developing world.