I have concluded that there are two fundamental obstacles in making socialised health care work.
1. Human nature (...and its impact on economics)
When something is free human nature is to use it excessively.
When something has value and a cost to yourself then we are more sparing with its usage.
Socialising healthcare obscures market forces. For example, if an individual wanted to buy a certain treatment for an illness in a totally independent health care system they would shop around for the service that provided the best quality to cost ratio. When you introduce socialised healthcare there is no incentive to shop around and people are likely to except lower quality because its 'free at the point of need'. Plus the socialised healthcare does not have to respond to market indicators and compete on quality and price. Thats why no matter how much money you throw at the NHS it will never be fixed, because they do not have an incentive to respond to market forces and the people who use it will use it more excessively.
2. Moral arguement
You will often hear that 'you shouldn't make a profit out of healthcare'. Should we be making profit out of people with cancer? Well what if the profit was used to develop a cure for cancer? If a company did that then doesn't it deserve a profit? I know that people often say that health care should be altruistic but that removes human nature from the equation. Would you do anything without a benefit to yourself? Would you work for the benefit of your boss without being cut a pay-cheque at the end of the month?
People often say that mixing healthcare and business is abhorrent, but what about healthcare and politics? The NHS only reacts to things which the politicians think they can get political mileage from. Take for example the treatment of mental health patients compared to that of the elderly. Politicians can target the ever increasing elderly people voting block, however what would be the point of targeting mentally ill people?
