[ExI] How to get a healthy country

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 17/10/2007, James Clement <clementlawyer at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis wrote:
>
> > The fact that there are five times as many MRI machines in the US as
> > Canada suggests that there is more profit to be made in MRI's. If it
> > actually turned out that diverting funds from other areas to MRI
> > machines improved health outcomes then why wouldn't bureaucrats in
> > Canada or anywhere else do this?
>
> I think it would be informative to ask a Canadian hospital diagnostician
> whether they'd WANT more MRIs if they could just requisition them (i.e., if
> the bureaucrats didn't limit them, probably because of budgets).

Of course they couldn't just requisition anything they wanted. I work
in the public hospital system in Australia, and everyone is always
bitching about not enough beds, not enough staff etc. But there is
only a finite amount of money available for health care; the problem
is how to allocate this money so that it does the most good, not so
that it makes someone the most profit. There are some situations where
the free market does not do the best job of allocating resources, and
health is one of them, along with education, law enforcement, and
defence.





-- 
Stathis Papaioannou