At least from how the French healthcare system seems to be doing these days, I would hesitate to call it "self-sustaining". It's not that I find it over-generous, just that it doesn't look quite as affordable for the society as it did 20-30 years ago (and it's probably never been). I suppose taxing financial transactions and bonuses might help (and provide some social justice as well, by bringing back to the community part of those banking fees and penalties). But would it be enough. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Of course there can also be service inefficiencies and cost inflation, but what evidence I have seen appears to indicate that public service ethic led healthcare systems tend to deliver better healthcare for more people for less cost than private profit centred systems do - which invariably seem to cherry pick what services they deliver to what patients based on their profitability, whilst leaving the public sector to pick up the tab for the rest.
Certainly I would want my doctor or hospital to be motivated by concern for my health rather than concern for their profit margins, and merely relying on their "professional ethics" to guarantee optimised healthcare doesn't cut it for me. Why have a perverse incentive to maximise profitable treatments when my best treatment might be highly unprofitable and yet still expect doctors to choose the latter course? notes from no w here
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
By the way, I like clean seats, but I hardly ever need all that sophisticated lighting, the air conditioning, or the bar wagon. That looks more and more like a train for those Serious People swissshhhing from Paris to Brussels to London - or off to the Côte d'Azur. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
I suppose taxing financial transactions and bonuses might help (and provide some social justice as well, by bringing back to the community part of those banking fees and penalties). But would it be enough.
simple answer: yes, if the taxes were high enough!
that might indeed help... ~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.
