Comment by c22
1 day ago
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
> funding (preallicated fixed amount vs post payment for itemised coded services)
Could you expand on this?
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.
Yes exactly, so keep the current model for that. What is safe enough depends on overton window to some extent.