It is impossible. The reason is simple. The govt does not spend its own money. For the govt to spend a dollar, it first has to take that dollar. Then when it spends other people’s money, it is a SURE thing that it will do so wastefully and inefficiently. All govt spending is inherently inefficient b/c of this simple fact. People do not spend other people’s money as efficiently as they do their own.
So a govt run healthcare business would be just like all the other govt services we experience every day. The military buys $400 toilet seats, the public schools are a disaster, if you need to go to the dept. of motor vehicles, plan on spending an hour in the waiting room. The post office…? haha!!
I will wait for the OP to respond. I didn’t read it as an analog to the Post Office, which doesn’t get to pick and choose routes. And, from wikipedia: “The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters.”
So, let’s let the OP set the parameters, and in the meantime I’ll look forward to your and njtt supporting my bid to get tax dollars to subsidize my business!
That’s pure nonsense. The government is more efficient than private institutions at some things, worse at others; it certainly isn’t automatically less efficient. That position is just as irrational and ideologically based as the mirror-image Communist one of having the government run everything.
It’s also disproven by the facts, however much they offend you. Government funded health care is more efficient and effective.
Do you have any evidence that government hospitals cost more to run, or are you making this up?
Healthcare is too complex a mix to be pushed into such a politicized box. Do you seriously think that the main difference between UCLA Medical Center and Stanford University Hospital is that the former is government? And what about the National Institutes of Heath Clinical Center vs. Johns Hopkins? One thing I’ll note – the former pays its management a heck of a lot less. Please provide such specific examples that have convinced you, rather than an unsupported broad-brush statement.
Also, if you really believe that the government hospitals are wasteful and inefficient, you should be pushing for them to admit private insurance patients so that their cost structure is subject to marketplace rigors. My son now lives on the same block, in Taiwan, with a military hospital that takes civilian patients. This insures that military surgeons have enough day-in day-out volume to keep up their skills. If our military hospitals are inefficient as you imply, let’s open them up.
I can’t resist pointing out that you aren’t making your case as well as you could. Those toilet seats are commonly described as $600, and were actually more:
[The molds had to be specially made, as it had been decades since their original production. The price reflected the design work and the cost of the equipment to manufacture them. Lockheed Corp. charged $34,560 for 54 toilet covers, or $640 each. . . .
The president of Lockheed at the time, Lawrence Kitchen, adjusted the price to $100 each and returned $29,165.](Toilet seat - Wikipedia)
Now, personally, I would be against a government take-over of health care. But having the government compete – that I am all for.
I think the problem is putting the label of “healthcare” on it. Not that you made up the category, but everyone uses it. It would be like asking if the government can run the “travel” business better than a private company.
If you mean road maintenance and street lighting, then absolutely. If you mean auto sales, then absolutely not.
Same way with healthcare. If we introduced a true market based system, then most people would be able to afford routine health care out of pocket. If we are talking about emergency surgery, then no. There’s no reason routine contraception should be under the same system as stage 4 cancer treatment. Healthcare isn’t the same from top to bottom so the answer isn’t the same based on each component.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The ideal of any for-profit institution after all is 100% waste - if they could they’d keep all the money they are paid in return for providing no services and paying no wages. Thievery, in other words. At least government doesn’t have the same built-in incentive to cheat you.
No evidence altho I seem to remember some stories about Walter Reed hospital that were pretty scary. My assertion that all govt spending is inherently inefficient is based on the principle that any person will spend his own money far more efficiently than he will spend someone else’s money. I believe economists call these 3rd party payments.
Some might see this as a poor comparison but I will use it anyway. Befoe I retired I fixed trucks for a living. I have worked for shops as well as captive fleets. In a captive fleet we have no incentve to see that truck comeback. We have no incentive to spend anymore money fixing that truck than we need to. I know very few fleet mechanics that don’t do thier best on each and every job simply because they take pride in their work.
On the other hand private shops who do work for companies encourage the drivers to come back with every excuse they can come up with. They spend far more than they need to spend on a good portion of the repairs as well, obviously not all shops do this but they do have an incentive to generate income from repairs.
As for medicare, what would happen to all the drug addicts that have crooked doctors writing scripts for oxycodone, or any other number of drugs they use or all the fraudulent billing that goes on. The current system is broken.
Millions can’t. And the insurance companies routinely try to avoid paying out on such policies.
It is not “self evident” at all. The goal of running a business is to make a profit, not to be efficient. If being inefficient means more of a profit, then they’ll be enthusiastically inefficient. To use a health care related example, an insurance company efficiently paying what it owes on time is less profitable than inefficiently stalling in the hopes that the patient will die and the company won’t have to pay anything at all.
Thank you for an honest reply. But what happened to that hospital? Answer: After the Washington Post exposé, the government closed it. I’m not sure it was cause an effect – there were too many military hospitals in the DC area – but it does show that government health care institutions which don’t work well can be closed. Another example of a weak government hospital which closed after negative press is Philadelphia General. Better government hospitals, like the VA system, should not, and do not, close.
If this applied to health care, then people who pay their medical bills directly, like the uninsured and medical tourists to the US, would be getting the best health care prices. Instead they are lucky to get 20 percent off the list price, while Blue Cross negotiates 80 or 90 percent discounts. Health care simply does not follow your broad-brush generalizations about government and private industry.
Sick people are in a terrible position to negotiate prices.
You realize, do you not, that what you’re describing is exactly the private health coverage system we have right now, and exactly not what a government-run system would be like?
USPS has an unfair advantage called the law…that may be better than tax dollars. Are you aware of Private Express Statutes. Private carriers must charge more, can only deliver “urgent” packages, etc. Who, exactly, is USPS competing with?
That’s the thing with government run anything. They can use tax dollars to their advantage or the law to the disadvantage of any competitor.
Its not like we don’t have plenty of examples and models of government run hospitals allready in operation. States and counties all over the country have them right now. Some are good examples and some are poor examples but we would have a good idea of what we would be dealing with if they were on a federal level. Martin Luther King Hospital in South Loas Angeles has been closed down but would be a perfect example of what not to do.
I guess if you are someone who believes that people spend other people’s money just as efficiently as they spend their own, then you deserve govt health care.