[ExI] government corruption

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/2/27 painlord2k at libero.it <painlord2k at libero.it>:

> It is obviously a public hospital, and it continue to be open and working.
> The administrators tell how difficult is to find qualified workers and how
> hard is their job.
>
> This reinforce my point; a private hospital could never do the same thing
> and continue do be open. Or they could do the same things at much lower
> costs.

Actually there are many examples of private hospitals and nursing
homes which have major problems and try to cover them up, until
something terrible happens and there is an investigation. Sometimes
they close down, sometimes they sack the offending parties and carry
on. It is quite common for nursing homes in particular to be closed
down because they don't meet standards on random (government)
inspections. Interestingly, this regulation of private operators by
the government is demanded by the paying public, who don't derive a
lot of comfort from the idea that if their operation is screwed up
they can always go somewhere else.

As for efficiency, medical care in the US costs about twice as much as
in any comparable country, with outcomes such as infant mortality and
life expectancy near the bottom of the OECD list. This infuriates
supporters of private health care, who advance various arguments to
explain what they see as an anomaly, eg. that Americans are less
healthy to begin with, or that the problem is that the system is only
partially privatised. This is because they believe it is physically or
perhaps even logically *necessary* that a private system is better and
more efficient than a public one, so that any empirical evidence to
the contrary *must* mean that there is something wrong with the
empirical evidence or its interpretation.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou