https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/business/nhs-strikes-private-healthcare-uk/index.html Not that America is anywhere close to moving towards a Medicare-For-All system, but this Britain is evidence that we can't rely on the government to be the sole provider of healthcare. While I think our current system is wasteful, corrupt, and we need universal healthcare, we should be looking at other models, such as Singapore's. Competition is good. A government monopoly on healthcare would be terrible.
Clearly I don't know about NHS (I need to take some time looking that up), but might as well chime in on Sweden's situation which may or may not be similar. Here it's basically the case privatization of healthcare has been ongoing for over a decade. What you do to detonate a public healthcare system is, you allow private medical institutions that can charge anything and have any wages they like. They will proceed to attract the most motivated staff (or just any staff that wants higher pay) by offering higher wages, and they can charge (not to mention they usually help themselves to public money as well to "compete on equal terms"). The public hospitals can't charge and get a fixed sum of money. So you a gradual exodus of personell to the private sector, which eventually starts impacting quality. At that point, politicans will say "don't give the public healthcare more funds, they're so bad". Eventually, work conditions become horrible at the public hospitals since they have to serve a large number of poor people with a limited budget, further compounding the staff drain effect. The result becomes more American, that is: way more expensive in total, quality for a fewer patients. We also have the hilarious situation of needing to close hospitals in remote parts of the country due to staff shortages because how they hell are they going to compete wage wise and in attractiveness with big cities?
Once public service is completely undermined/sabotaged/defunded, they do a rug pull on employees by stunting wage growth, pulling benefits and employee protections (collective bargaining), and buying up political representation. Quite simply, the public and private sector cannot coexist as the private sector will always seek to undermine the public sector to rid itself of a competitor which is why some sectors/services should always remain public. You could have the strongest laws to avoid this issue, but they will be eroded away over time via bought politicians as has been done in the US. At times, despots will do the opposite in the search for power and seek to nationalize private sectors that should not be public.
United Health is now the biggest Dow component, weighted 9.24%. It is unconsciously rich, squeezing both payors and payees alike and pockets the difference as earnings. It is not a pharma or medical research companies, I simply don't know what its purpose of existence.
People will always seek to undermine the public sector even if there's no private competition. No competition creates no incentives to advance technology, improve quality, etc. Bureaucracy also slows all of these things down if not grinds them to a halt.
Yet most of the advances in pharma and medicine are done with public funding in research universities. The private sector remains the gatekeeper for said advances.
It's better to have both. Not everybody wants to work in an academic setting. They shouldn't be the only people we allow to advance healthcare science. Look at who created the two best COVID vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna teamed up with the government.
I never said government should not fund developments outside academia. Livermore just cracked fusion for example, Cuba developed a lung cancer vaccine for all the good decades long embargo's done. A no name couple of ex-professors developed the pfeizer MRNA vaccine for all the money that big pharma has. This is no victory of capitalism, but an impeachment of it and gov's lack of spending on things that matter.
Not sure if this belongs here, but kinda: https://babylonbee.com/news/tonight...e=The Babylon Bee Newsletter&utm_medium=email