If lots of people don't want to go to a certain hospital it will lose money. Problem? Nope. It will lose money for a good reason then, because it's not delivering what patients want, and it'll have to adapt or downsize. This is a good thing as it will force inefficient hospitals to work better. It's kind of what competition is all about: forcing inefficient facilities to become more efficient, or lose their customers. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Your model would condemn an underclass to substandard health care by abandoning the commitment to uniformly good public health provision.
And by "uniformly good" I don't mean that everything should be the same, but that everyone should have access to a local facility of a certain minimum standard.
You reason as if health care were a consumer good, or a lifestyle service - no different from hairdressers... The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
Also, observe that it's not just the kids who're put into private schools who become better off, but the ones who stay in the improving public schools are also better off.
Personally I went to public schools. One was horrible, one was semi-good, and one was excellent.
In the best of worlds (ie Finland) we would only have public schools, and they would all be great. But just like when it comes to our healthcare system, such an outcome is impossible for political reasons, and this is the second best alternative. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
At least in our system, each pupil has a check, kind of. This check is given to the school of the pupils choice. There's no other mode of financing the schools. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I don't know what you call that, but I call it cream skimming.
And really... the best school I went to was when I was 16-18. It was an inner city school with great reputation, long history, and so on. So was the most horrible school I went to, when I was 7-11 years old. And the semi-good one, when I was 12-15. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
My fear is that the people who make the rules will be from the part of the system that think in terms of international trade, rather than the parts of the system that think in terms of health care quality and social policy. Because, on the record, the international trade types seem to neither know nor care when their ideology imposes some regulation that is not technology- or public/private neutral.
