Cloud Breaker said:
Cirdan said:
Public healthcare works fine. In some countries, it's been deliberately mismanaged (e.g. Britain), in others, the funding was never collected properly (e.g. France, where employers get massive deductions from their share of the bill), but when the government honestly tries, it works without trouble.
It works best when the country's population is not so big..
That's an obscenely stupid comment. People are the source of income, people are what the income is spent on, therefore people factor out of the equation. People/people=1, and one is the multiplicative identity.
If you qualified your statement, you might be right. In a capitalist country, if there is a very unequal income repartition and if the very rich control the state, then public healthcare can run into funding problems if the population is large and if you accept that in the general case the ruling class is proportionally smaller when the population is larger. That is, in fact, the problem with public healthcare in France, where recent governments have pursued a policy of taking from the poor to give to the rich.
D'Sparil said:
Public health care gives some people the chance to get treatment and live, despite their income. Theres no ****ing way a guy who makes $600 a month is going to save $50.000 for the oncological treatment that might save his life. Wheter those people deserve that money to get spent on them or not is a different discussion. But I do believe that a health care system based solely (or almost solely) on private companies is really easily subject to being abused by said companies. The bureocracy of the state might be slower, but you are guaranteed to get what you are suppossed to get, or at least thats how it works here.
These people deserve the money to be spent on them. In fact, generally speaking, the lower a person's income is the more essential they are to the economy. The very rich are mostly parasites; most multimillionaires do not contribute anything other than funding, which can be supplied by an efficient banking sector. They are useless but they enrich themselves with wealth generated by the other classes of society. Some people become rich thanks to an innovative idea and hard work, but by the time they are rich this contribution is in the past. The middle classes generally play an organisational role in the economy; what they produce cannot generally be consumed, yet it enhances (greatly) the production of actual consumables. They are non-necessary but useful. However, the lower classes are indispensable; you simply cannot do without the people who produce your food, build your house, sew your clothes or remove your garbage*. They are essential. Hence, they deserve healthcare more than any other class of society.
Of course, humans and their activities rarely fit into convenient little boxes, so that's a very simplified overview. But it mostly holds true.
*Well, you could always ask the army to remove the garbage
Why? well, think about it. If you lived a country without highly invested public health care, odds are you'll be getting a bit of tax relief because of that. Now, a smart person would go "oh, better get some health cover from a private company', while others might go "Woo, holiday!". Its all relative, or so i figure, but good public health care kind of takes away the opportunity for people to be stupid and spend money that they probably should have saved.
Except that a private company might charge you more than the state. The state is interested in its citizens' welfare; the private company is interested in its profits. You're also overlooking the case of those who will not be able to afford proper healthcare, not matter how well they manage their money.