With health care, you get what you pay for, in the sense that it cannot be cheap and (consistently) good. It can be expensive and bad, of course, but that's true for everything...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
If it's still cheaper and with no waiting times, it's in everyones best interest.
What's happening is that certain industries move to where they have an absolute advantage. To make it perfectly clear: if foreigners start going to Poland it will increase the budgets of the Polish healthcare system to compensate for the increased load, ie more doctors and nurses can be hired. It might even increase the quality of the local care as it is likely that the Poles can demand higher payment from Swedes than from Poles, and it will still be cheaper overall.
In the long run it won't work like that of course, as Polish wages will catch up with those in Sweden, but then in the long run we are all dead. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
In the meantime, a single doctor has only so many hours in the day and if he spends it with one patient, then another patient must wait. Unless of course he doesn't have a full schedule. Are you suggesting that Polish doctors are underworked? -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
To make it perfectly clear: if foreigners start going to Poland it will increase the budgets of the Polish healthcare system to compensate for the increased load, ie more doctors and nurses can be hired.
It's just as likely that the Polish healthcare system will keep the extra cash.
Increase in income only translates to increase in investment if rentiers/governments aren't greedy and stupid, there's someone capable and competent to make the strategic decision, and there's a reasonable chance the change will be lasting enough to make it worth doing, and that there's a body of out of work doctors immediately available - or at least hire-able from abroad.
If any of those are marginal, it won't happen.
Meantime, nothing guarantees Poles benefit from this situation. The brainless should not be in banking. — Willem Buitler
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.
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.
