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NHS chiefs warn that hospitals in England are on the brink of collapse

I understand the terminology and I understand the various problems relating to them. I’m questioning your assertion that these problems mean that no private good should ever supplied by the public and the extended implication that any level of government healthcare is automatically and unconditionally a bad thing.

Oh, you didn't sound to me as though you knew the terminology. Sorry.

I do not think that there are no situations in which a good of mostly private character should be government produced and distributed. What I do think and thought I had expressed was that in general this is not a good idea as it will waste resources in one way or another. As the health care sector is very large the expected waste of getting it wrong must be expected to be large and the negative effect correspondingly so. Now there may be sections of the product mix we associate with health care that it makes sense to supply. And there may be additional segments that we think that the waste is justified for some political reason and therefore want to produce and distribute the private good publicly. But it should be as little as possible so treated.
And most importantly:
Voters should be informed of the negative implications, the size of the reduction in general welfare, the personal costs per month they will individually face and the backlash that has occurred in the social democracies that have experimented with social medicine.
Also it should be explained why public supply was chosen over private purchase instead of giving the money to the poor to buy insurance.
 
Well, it is an opinion. That much is right. The thing is that it is like the opinion that water freezes at zero degrees Centigrade. It must not be correct under certain conditions, but it is a well tested science based place to start a discussion about the freezing point of water. On the other hand, it is uneducated to start by saying that water freezes at a higher temperature and the zero degree hypothesis is only an opinion.

Except that economics is not a science and unlike the freezing point of water, you cannot perform a double-blind experiment on you hypothesis.
 
Except that economics is not a science and unlike the freezing point of water, you cannot perform a double-blind experiment on you hypothesis.

Well, nasty tongues would say that, wouldn't they? Especially, when the science doesn't say, what their ideology demands.
 
Well, nasty tongues would say that, wouldn't they? Especially, when the science doesn't say, what their ideology demands.

You're the only one placing ideology ahead of intellectual rigour. You have every opportunity to explain your assertion, why public funds must never be used for private good, but you seem incapable of doing so. There are few examples of pure public goods. By your argument public funds may not be used on any services that aren't, so no public investment in social care, education, roads and transport infrastructure etc etc. and all this disinvestment based on a rigid maxim that you cannot explain. Instead you fall back on the ad hominem of 'nasty tongues', whatever that's meant to mean.
 
Oh, you didn't sound to me as though you knew the terminology. Sorry.
No problem. :cool:

As the health care sector is very large the expected waste of getting it wrong must be expected to be large and the negative effect correspondingly so. Now there may be sections of the product mix we associate with health care that it makes sense to supply. And there may be additional segments that we think that the waste is justified for some political reason and therefore want to produce and distribute the private good publicly. But it should be as little as possible so treated.
Health care is large and complex regardless of the funding model(s) behind it and always carries massive risks of waste and, more importantly, direct harm to individual patients and wider public health. You don’t resolve this risks by simply shifting the underlying funding from public to private (or vice-versa). It’s perfectly possible to conceive of healthcare funding structures that are either entirely private or entirely public which provide effective and comprehensive health provision. Human nature and messy practical realities get in the way of such perfection though and have to be accounted for. They generally can’t be best accounted for from either end of the spectrum alone though, which is one of the reasons why some form of mixed, middle-ground system is always the best option.

There is one thing I do want to make clear and the reason I initially commented in the first place (the reason I normally end up commenting on this kind of thread). Stating or implying that specific problems or issues within a particular places healthcare system are entirely (or even just primarily) due to the fundamental funding structure of the healthcare system as a whole is always wrong.

Voters should be informed of the negative implications, the size of the reduction in general welfare, the personal costs per month they will individually face and the backlash that has occurred in the social democracies that have experimented with social medicine.
Also it should be explained why public supply was chosen over private purchase instead of giving the money to the poor to buy insurance.
Voters should always be fully informed (but generally never will be). Fully informed doesn’t mean just the one-sided opinions you’re expressing here though, but a complete and balanced understanding of all of the various advantages, disadvantages, risks and benefits and an acknowledgement that there is no magical solution to this issue that will make healthcare so much better, cheaper and fairer. For all of the fundamental differences we’re discussing here, the experiences of real patients in real hospitals will be fairly consistent across the entire Western world.
 
You're the only one placing ideology ahead of intellectual rigour. You have every opportunity to explain your assertion, why public funds must never be used for private good, but you seem incapable of doing so. There are few examples of pure public goods. By your argument public funds may not be used on any services that aren't, so no public investment in social care, education, roads and transport infrastructure etc etc. and all this disinvestment based on a rigid maxim that you cannot explain. Instead you fall back on the ad hominem of 'nasty tongues', whatever that's meant to mean.

I am sorry you misunderstood me so mischievously, but I linked the explanations and did explain that to say "public funds must never be used for private good" is not, what I meant to say and probably didn't. Anyone that understood me to have been categorical in that respect did not read the whole input. What is correct is that removing a private good from the market allocation process to the public sphere will waste limited resources and so will reduce general welfare. A society can nonetheless decide for the waste and less efficiency. This will reduce, what it is capable of accomplishing in a different area. Also, goods are not always public in all of their features and might have subcategories, where the public aspects weigh more than the private. But you do not even try to make the rational argument and plum for ideologically driven socialization. But in Germany right now, we are seeing, what happens to a universal public run system. People have paid all their lives and are now getting less than they had voted for and contracted, because it is not sustainable.

As for other publicly supplied goods, you must look at each one from the vantage of economic knowledge. You see, a product can have been a mostly public good or a private good worth supplying publicly at the lower level of technology available 10 or 30 years ago. Today's transaction costs or information availability have relegated many of these historically sensible solutions to competitive disadvantages and the undesirables heap.
 
No problem. :cool:

Health care is large and complex regardless of the funding model(s) behind it and always carries massive risks of waste and, more importantly, direct harm to individual patients and wider public health. You don’t resolve this risks by simply shifting the underlying funding from public to private (or vice-versa). It’s perfectly possible to conceive of healthcare funding structures that are either entirely private or entirely public which provide effective and comprehensive health provision. Human nature and messy practical realities get in the way of such perfection though and have to be accounted for. They generally can’t be best accounted for from either end of the spectrum alone though, which is one of the reasons why some form of mixed, middle-ground system is always the best option.

There is one thing I do want to make clear and the reason I initially commented in the first place (the reason I normally end up commenting on this kind of thread). Stating or implying that specific problems or issues within a particular places healthcare system are entirely (or even just primarily) due to the fundamental funding structure of the healthcare system as a whole is always wrong.

Voters should always be fully informed (but generally never will be). Fully informed doesn’t mean just the one-sided opinions you’re expressing here though, but a complete and balanced understanding of all of the various advantages, disadvantages, risks and benefits and an acknowledgement that there is no magical solution to this issue that will make healthcare so much better, cheaper and fairer. For all of the fundamental differences we’re discussing here, the experiences of real patients in real hospitals will be fairly consistent across the entire Western world.

Talking about waste, the German Ministry released numbers that show too high a frequency of doctor's visits for a discussion on rationing the number of visits allowed a patient in a year. It is still very early and might not be made to law, but a similar discussion did effectively limit the Euro amount of prescription medicine a doctor may grant his patients in a month.
 
Talking about waste, the German Ministry released numbers that show too high a frequency of doctor's visits for a discussion on rationing the number of visits allowed a patient in a year. It is still very early and might not be made to law, but a similar discussion did effectively limit the Euro amount of prescription medicine a doctor may grant his patients in a month.
Sounds like a real world practical problem and efforts to work out a reasonable approach to minimise it. Note that they have a mixed system and they’re not talking about changing that principle, just managing the specifics. You will see similar problems and different problems in the same areas with privately-funded provision too. For example, some people who don’t visit doctors when they should because of cost and insurance commonly having co-pays and annual limits to prevent people “overusing” their cover (which in itself can have negative consequences).

It really all boils down to the same kind of problems and complications with the same kind of solutions.
 
I am sorry you misunderstood me so mischievously, but I linked the explanations and did explain that to say "public funds must never be used for private good" is not, what I meant to say and probably didn't. Anyone that understood me to have been categorical in that respect did not read the whole input.
What part of:

the thing boils down to the fact that a private good should not be supplied by the public.

...did we misunderstand mischievously?


What is correct is that removing a private good from the market allocation process to the public sphere will waste limited resources and so will reduce general welfare. A society can nonetheless decide for the waste and less efficiency.
Isn't that what every economy in the world does to a greater or lesser extent? Tell us, and be specific, which private goods are not removed from the market allocation process in any way? I understand that it's a point of principle and aspiration of anarcho-capitalists, but just like CPEs, it has never been proved to work.

Also, goods are not always public in all of their features and might have subcategories, where the public aspects weigh more than the private. But you do not even try to make the rational argument and plum for ideologically driven socialization.
Providing universal healthcare free at the point of delivery is not an ideologically-driven idea. It is a rational solution to a universal demand.

Healthcare is neither a wholly public nor private good. It is a merit good that benefits both the individual consumer and society in general. It is excludable, but different societies have decided on varying ways of judging the criteria used for excluding individuals from consuming it.

The UK model sees medical judgement of need and, in a situation of elastic demand and ineleastic supply, waiting lists also act as that mechanism. The general approach of privately operated health services uses price to exclude. Sure, ideology plays a part in deciding which model to adopt, but the benefits of a universal, tax-funded system are easily explained, it's just that they are not all economic. A healthy populace is a more productive populace in general, and improving universal healthcare has proved time and again (look at China, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea) to be a driver of economic growth, but those are not the only important considerations.

Providing universal healthcare has so many benefits it's hard to list them all here, but decreases in infant mortality, increasing life-expectancy, reduction of morbidity and congenital disability are just a few. Most of those have positive economic ramifications, but more significantly, they are contributors to the social good. Unless you take a Malthusian attitude to improved life expectancy, the benefits of these improvements seem self-evident.

As for other publicly supplied goods, you must look at each one from the vantage of economic knowledge. You see, a product can have been a mostly public good or a private good worth supplying publicly at the lower level of technology available 10 or 30 years ago.
Okay, you're contradicting yourself here. Either public funding of a private good is wrong in principle, as you've been arguing earlier in the thread, or it's not. Here it appears that you are not arguing the principle, but a situational approach to public funding of private goods.

Today's transaction costs or information availability have relegated many of these historically sensible solutions to competitive disadvantages and the undesirables heap.
According to your ideologically-driven social agenda, but don't take it from me that arguments for UHC transcend pure economic rationales, here's a very well argued and widely documented article from a Nobel prize-winning economist.
 
Sounds like a real world practical problem and efforts to work out a reasonable approach to minimise it. Note that they have a mixed system and they’re not talking about changing that principle, just managing the specifics. You will see similar problems and different problems in the same areas with privately-funded provision too. For example, some people who don’t visit doctors when they should because of cost and insurance commonly having co-pays and annual limits to prevent people “overusing” their cover (which in itself can have negative consequences).

It really all boils down to the same kind of problems and complications with the same kind of solutions.

Oh, the political parties cannot easily change the system officially. They all have vested interests in the various social systems and the de facto political elite is the membership in public services, whose whole raison d'étre is based in the production of the various private goods by government. The trick has been to obfuscate the withdrawal of services in ways that seem to be other. The 2010 initiative installed by the SPD was an attempt to explain the impossibility of maintaining the level of services that the workers had been paying for into their old age*). This cost the SPD almost half its supporters and has been a warning that the approach cannot be but by stealth.

But the de facto result is increasingly a shift to privat initiative to supplement public programs whose importance is declining. The most interesting initiative in Europe is in Finland, where the social programs are supposed to be eliminated and replaced by a less costly system of minimum income. They are running experiments to find the best design right now. I hear that Holland is also looking at such a system, but has not yet decided to jump.

*) This had become necessary by 2003 as a result of having entered the Euro at a DM level that robbed Germany of competitiveness, which reduced the funds available for the social democratic programs earlier than would normally have been the case.
 
What part of:



...did we misunderstand mischievously?......

Of course one can act stupid and willfully misunderstand a statement of general principal as a statement of exclusivity, if one wants to be a troll.

PS: The rest I did not read, because I do not want to waste my time on someone that obviously isn't interested in the economics of an economic topic.
 
Of course one can act stupid and willfully misunderstand a statement of general principal as a statement of exclusivity, if one wants to be a troll.

PS: The rest I did not read, because I do not want to waste my time on someone that obviously isn't interested in the economics of an economic topic.

Your concession is noted, and not just by me I'm sure.

No discussion on healthcare is an exclusively economic topic.
 
Only to those who wish to deny the economic realities of unsustainability

Only an idiot would deny the problems of sustainability of a system which pits elastic demand with inelastic supply. Similarly, it's idiotic to look at the provision of healthcare as a purely economic issue. As I stated above, it's clearly much more than that and is driven every bit as much by social policy as economic policy. Sorry you can't see that.
 
Your concession is noted, and not just by me I'm sure.

No discussion on healthcare is an exclusively economic topic.

Of course it is not an exclusively economic topic. But without getting that straight first is highly unprofessional to the point of looking premeditated.
 
As the population grows, wages rise, and operational costs mount, governmental services require extra funding - shocking, isn't it?

When the government gets involved, cost rise. Incompetence and graft are expensive. Shocking isn't it? Actually, what's shocking is this is what President Obama, Sen. Clinton, Mr. Trump, and Dr. Jonathon Gruber want for the U.S.
 
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