| To be honest I'd be ok with private healthcare if they had to also obey the same constraints as public healthcare. IE they had to provide care to everyone at a reasonable price. I'm deeply suspicious of healthcare that gets to exclude people for cost reasons. I too can provide great healthcare if everyone is mandated to pay me for my services and I get to exclude those I treat, that's a great business, the healthy pay and I exclude the sick, what wonderful pure profit business! The insurance model bothers me for that reason, they really shouldn't be allowed to exclude anyone, if they're taking on the business of healthcare, then that's that, they are providing a utility service, which means they supply to everyone and they make money by spreading the cost between everyone. There are nuances to that, but practically that's the goal they should aspire to, but unfortunately that model isn't the most profitable. I mean take a look at the original US health insurance that existed: > The first plan guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for $6 a year, and was later extended to other employee groups in Dallas, and then nationally
[0] That insurance model worked, it just happened to get outcompeted by entities who were willing to undercut them by aiming to capture only the most healthy people, which is in effect a tragedy of the commons. Which is a real problem in my book, I'd be fascinated to see what innovations a private company could come up with under that model. We might have missed out on a whole slew of interesting ideas if we kept going down that route, which would still have been a pretty profitable business and would have been a great success for those who do believe that the private space can do healthcare better. As it stands I don't believe the current private model meets that criteria as it fails at the first hurdle of being a health care service, it doesn't care about health. So it seems like the choices are bad private care, good public care and bad public care. So yea, I'm leaning to the good public care. - [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cross_Blue_Shield_Associa... |