Should Private Health care exist in a democratic society/ Pros and Cons of PMI

Don Keypunch wrote: »

Should ones ability to pay have an influence on the type and ease at which they access health care?

Should we not all be treated the same?

Now I'm going to try and explain why private healthcare is not just nessacey - it is inevitable. This is based on the most basic medical care scenario. In real life people choose private health care for numerous reasons, most often comfort (private room/food etc) or speed of access, or to get a more expensive but more effective/less uncomfortable treatment), but I am going to use a life or death scenario, just to explain why there will always be some kind of private system.
This is not an explanation of Harney's policies in particular.

I may not explain this well, so other people please chip in.

First, some assumptions:
1. Resources are limited (Most people accept that).
2. The government does not control all resources (ditto, except the Communists).
3. Not all resources are spent on health, and to spend all resources on health would be undesireable (people also want education, social welfare, roads etc).
The 3 assumptions above mean that there is a cut-off point to healthcare - after a certain amount, the government has no more to spend. It can borrow against future resources, but it will have to pay that back, so it is unlikely to, unless it has no choice, because it is tying its hands in the future.

4. All lives are equal to the public health service.
This means that there must be a cut-off point for an individuals health care. For instance, if you spend €1,000,000 curing me of a fatal disease, but that money spent elsewhere would save maybe a hundred lives, then you should spend it to save the hundred (assuming that the health service cannot afford €1,000,000 per patient). If all lives are equal, and there is insufficient resources to cure both groups, then 100>1, ergo you save the 100.

5. This is the hard one. The public health service is concerned with saving lives all across society, not just those that it treats. Its goal should be to maximise the number of lives saved in society.

Now, the above assumptions, all of which are true in all Western countries, mean that a private service is inevitable. Why?
If there is a cutoff point for treatment, or (more realistically, a cutoff point from the best possible treatment), then there will be some people who will fall outside the the cutoff point, who will have their own resources, enough to purchase the treatment.
They have two choices:
1. They can choose to die.
2. They can go to a doctor with their resources, and purchase the treatment from them directly.

Even in countries where they made private healthcare illegal, there was still private healthcare, since people had nothing to lose by defying the government, and using their own resources to get the treatment.
This alone means that there will always be a private service.
Add to that that people are willing to pay extra for the private room and food, it is unlikely that any society could ever have no private healthcare.
Some argue that this healthcare should be banned as it is unequal, but in a free and liberal country, if private citizens want to pay extra to have better healthcare at no expense to the State, can they be forbidden?


The arguement that people use for having both a public and private system, is that if people go private, then less people are using the public system, so the resources in the public system are more concentrated. Harny herself said yesterday that (really rough quote) "The rich can look after there own healthcare, it is the disadvantaged who the state needs to watch over". The basic idea is that the government should focus on minding the "poor" directly, and allowing the "rich" (which is really anyone of middle income or higher), to use their own resources to decide their own healthcare.
This should, economically speaking, lead to more lives being saved among both the "well-off" (again middle-income rather than millionaires), because they can purchase super-fancy healthcare/ different treatment/extra face-time with doctors/ different food etc., while the "less well-off" benefit because they get more resources/ get to use facilities purchased by private individuals/ get to benefit from new techniques that are only developed due to private money*.

*For instance the author Terry Pratchett dumped €1,000,000 into research into his rare neurological illness recently - any benefit from that will be shared among all people with the disease.

The above is a crash course in some ideas in Health economics.. It is by no means exhaustive, nor does it even begin to cover the complexities of private versus public issues. There are whole journals dedicated to that.
The basic point that I am making is that a purely public system (which some people are calling for), is unworkable, retrograde, and would cause more people to die.

Stinicker wrote: »

Private Healthcare should exist and Public healthcare should be abolished, it is a sad time in our civilisation when the working person and entrepreneur has to part with his hard earned cash to pay for the health of someone else and to keep others on the dole.

Cut the Public Healthcare system and every man for himself.

rockmongrel wrote: »

Ah yes, the old things are **** here but ****ter elsewhere argument. Perish the thought that we should try to improve things.

Stinicker wrote: »

Cut the Public Healthcare system and every man for himself.

ascanbe wrote: »

People who wish to and can afford to, should be able to avail of private health care; but private and public should be entirely separate.
Doctors who choose to work in private health-care should not be given work in the public system and should not be allowed use public health-care facilities.