Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger
I wish I lived in this middle class utopia that some people here seem to want.
Just think a whole society of people in middle management jobs where nobody has any financial problems during their entire lives at all ,ever.
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(I'm going to use the word 'medic' all the way through after it was pointed out in great length to me the other day that most people who went to medical school aren't actually 'doctors')
If that were the state of society then medics would just up their prices and half of the people still wouldn't be able to afford to go to the medics. Either that or everybody would have enough extra cash to pay but the waiting lists would be huge.
I think that most of the medic-related problems you see in the NHS result from not enough medical school places being created, so that there aren't enough medics in the first place. If everything went private there still wouldn't be enough qualified medics around to deal with everybody adequately and there certainly wouldn't be enough to create a competitive capitalist environment. In fact, the system would probably be a lot less competitive because the customer wouldn't have the alternative of free state-funded treatment to barter with.
We've seen with the railway system here that privatisation can be a complete balls up, resulting in something which amounts to legal monopolisation and as a result much worse services at a much higher cost. The idea of universal privatisation of medical treatment leading to improved services doesn't always work when:
1) Medics have, due to 'old school ties', access to a more organised network of other practising medics and are generally in a position to take part in a kind of informal price-fixing (quite simply, if no medics lower their prices then everybody can continue to charge high prices for the services).
2) In most places there are a lack of medics compared to the demand, so medics don't need to cut their prices to get customers.
And the problems are probably worse in small towns/villages where they might be only one or two medics available. In that situation privatisation could easily lead to medics charging through the roof, knowing that their customers have no other alternative.
In the US there might be a huge surplus of trained medics, but in the UK that is not the case and I think the big problem is not universal healthcare but the number of people who are being funded to do ****ty mickey-mouse degrees instead of pushing more people towards medical school. More medics = greater supply compared to demand and with or without universal privatisation that will bring the cost of the service down (within the NHS such an action should lead to individual medics being paid less thus you get more medics for your tax-pound).