Tag Archives: Choice

News

Is government more efficient than the private sector?

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When it comes to providing quality services at the lowest cost, private firms are very different from government bureaucracies. A private firm has to compete in an open marketplace where consumers are free to shop around for the best deal. So a private firm has to provide more quality at a lower price or consumers will take their business to a competitor! And the owners and employees share in the profits or losses. They have an incentive to cut costs, raise quality and lower prices. They have a stake in pleasing the customer.

But what about government? Do they have competitors that pressure them lower costs and raise quality? Do the people who run the government benefit financially if they please customers? Do employees of the government benefit if they please customers? Do customers have the freedom to buy from someone else if they are not happy with the price or quality of government services?

Consider this Washington Times story. (H/T John Stossel via ECM)

Excerpt:

An audit of the government’s legal aid program for the poor concluded Monday that the purchase of more than $188,000 worth of imported Italian stone to decorate one of the program’s office buildings in Texas was unnecessary and excessive…

The inspector general of the Legal Services Corp.(LSC) said the stone, which adorns three full stories of a newly remodeled Fort Worth office building, “appears only to be decorative in nature” and does not constitute a “reasonable and necessary” expense.

If a private firm wasted money like this, they would go out of business. The directors and employees who run private firms never waste money like this! If they did, the private firm would go out of business. But the government wastes money like this all the time. It’s not their money, after all – it’s your money. Why should they spend it wisely? What’s in it for them?

And they’re aren’t exactly accountable when they get caught wasting taxpayer money, either.

The inspector general quoted officials involved with the Texas program as defending the purchase, saying the high-end imported stone was selected for its beautiful finish and installed as a decorative flourish.

And this applies to government-run health care, too. Why should be expect government to cut health care costs when they have no incentive to be efficient? Private firms have an incentive – to keep their jobs, to be promoted, to get raises, etc. Government has no incentive to be efficient.

News

NHS hospitals infested with a dozen varieties of vermin

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Story from the UK Telegraph. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Excerpt:

Ants in operating theatres and maternity, cockroaches in x-ray and mice in A&E are some of the 30,000 pest infestations in NHS hospitals over the last four years, figures have revealed.

Data released under the Freedom of Information Act shows NHS hospitals in England have dealt with almost 30,000 pest infestations since 2006. Exterminators were called to deal with black ants, wasps, rodents, cluster flies, biting insects, silver fish, woodlice, bird mites, maggots, pigeons, red spiders, may bugs, mosquitoes, ladybirds, bees, mice and fleas.

The pests were found in all areas of hospitals including patient wards, operating theatres, maternity units, A&E and children’s wards as well as in kitchens, maintenance, offices and staff accommodation. On average 70 exterminators are called out each day to NHS hospitals in England and often deal with more than one infestation at a time.

When the consumers are not the ones paying the bills, and there are no competing vendors, what possible incentive is there for the service providers to provide quality service? There is no inventive, and so there is no quality service.

News

39-year old woman is prescribed painkillers and dies after 11-minute NHS exam

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ECM sent me this exclusive story from The Record.

Excerpt:

A MUM suffering chest pains died in front of her young son hours after being sent home from hospital and told to take painkillers.

Debra Beavers, 39, phoned NHS 24 twice in two days before getting a hospital appointment. But a doctor gave what her family described as a cursory examination lasting 11 minutes, before advising her to buy over-the-counter medicine Ibuprofen.

Family members claim the medic was abrupt and rude – and when Debra clutched her chest, he told her: “Your heart is on the other side.”

Seven hours later, the mum-of-two collapsed and died from a heart attack in front of her 13-year-old boy.

The government-run health care administrators say that no mistakes were made:

[…]A spokeswoma for NHS Fife said: “We would like to express our condolences. NHS Fife’s duty to uphold patient confidentiality prevents us from making any comment on an individual case.”

NHS 24 executive nurse director Eunice Muir said: “We can confirm Ms Beavers contacted NHS 24 and that her onward referral was managed safely and appropriately.

“We would ask her family to contact us if there are any aspects of the case they wish to discuss.”

Believe me, this kind of rushing through examinations is exactly the kind of thing you can expect when the government is paying instead of the patient. When the government pays for health care, the doctor has ZERO incentive to provide good quality. You have one choice of provider. That means you either take the bad treatment paid for by the government or you can go home and die.

And if you don’t like it, you have NO RECOURSE. Because this is the government you are dealing with! Nothing is going to happen to fix it because no one has any profit incentive to fix it. Everyone involved is probably unionized, so no one can be fired. The customer has no rights in a socialized system, which is exactly what Barack Obama said he wanted in that video from 2003.

Free market capitalism is designed to protect people by forcing the providers of products and services to please the customer better than any other competing vendors. Government-run health destroys these incentives by 1) removing the leverage that the customer have the money, and 2) removing the customer’s ability to choose another vendor if they are not happy.

Recall that Obama said that people should get painkillers instead of surgery in this video. When will people understand? The left has swallowed all kinds of lies about global warming, overpopulation, gun control, and everything in between. They have misdiagnosed the problems we face and are proposing solutions are worse than the problems themselves, because of their ignorance of reality.

Dogs have better health care than people in socialized systems

Theodore Dalrymple compares the health care provided to dogs and people in socialized systems in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mark Steyn via ECM)

Excerpt:

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs.

Steyn knows what he is talking about – he escaped the nightmare of fully socialized medicine in Canada. The profit motive coupled with a competitive free market is the only solution proven to reduce the cost of medical care. The government has no incentive to give you health care when you are old – you are no longer supplying them with tax money! That’s why the Democrats want to be able to deny treatment to the elderly.

Michelle Malkin has a round-up of a half-dozen recent horror stories from the National Health Service. Is this what we want for our health care?