Socialized Medicine

[JPSartre12]

Hey everyone, I've had a thought bouncing around my in my head for a while.

Here in the US, with the whole Affordable Care Act about to be decided next week, the right-wing is throwing around all these terms like socialized medicine, etc etc without really knowing what they mean.

I have some close family that lives in Québec, and they absolutely love their healthcare system. Single-payer insurance and all that, but a lot of hospitals are left privately-owned because it forces them to compete for patients and government funding.

In the UK, though, both the insurance and the hospitals themselves are owned by the government.

Which do you guys think is better? Single-payer insurance, or single-payer insurance coupled with nationalized hospitals? I'm thinking the first, because it can take advantage of market forces a bit to promote quality, competition, etc. But then again, the second allows better price control, etc.

Opinion?

[Regicollis]

In Denmark the hospitals were previously fully publicly owned but the previous right-wing government started to move more jobs to private hospitals. This has created quite a few problems.

The private hospitals are siphoning money out of the system because of an openly corrupt system of overpayment to "build a market"
Doctors at public hospitals are spending more and more time working at private practices where they are paid more than in the public system
The public hospitals are paid less than the private ones although the private hospitals only do simple and plannable "one patient - one disease" tasks. The public hospitals also have to deal with the more complicated cases, with emergency functions and with training new doctors and nurses


While it may be true that competition may lead to some efficiency it also has a huge overhead. An example I know of is hearing aids. Some years ago it was made possible to get hearing aids through private clinics with a government grant. But strangely enough the prices have risen so that the cheapest hearing aid costs exactly the same as the maximum grant. These private clinics are also known to foist expensive hearing aids on people who don't need them. The private clinics are also giving people hearing aids against tinnitus when the medically correct thing would be to send them to a doctor as tinnitus can be a symptom of other ailments - but that don't generate a profit for them. The private clinics are also spending a ton of money on marketing and advertising (often promising impossible improvements in hearing).

What this shows is that a privatised system is necessarily bound to be corrupted. It has all the wrong incentives built into it. It rewards over-treatment and discourages preventive medicine. It downgrades the treatment of patients with complicated diseases to get as many simple and easy patients as possible through the system.

As with all other kinds of private business private hospitals have to throw money out on profits for the owners and on advertising.

I think that as long as we are stuck with capitalism hospitals and all other public services should be kept on public hands.