David Osland (at the other place) offers a wonderfully concise critique of the utilisation of the private sector to deliver public goods....
'We're told pensions are 'unsustainable', the Post Office is 'unsustainable' & now that the NHS is 'unsustainable'. They were all entirely sustainable before the private sector starting looting the public sector'!
Yup, that's about it....
@ChrisMayLA6 The logic seems straightforward to me. Take the NHS as an example. An NHS which uses more and more private resource will not cost us less as we still have to pay for everything we currently pay for but we also have to stump up for profits. As shown by water infrastructure, private big business is way more interested in bonuses than it is in investing in the business. So an NHS with more privatisation will cost more and get worse.
Whilst I am not in any way in favour of the privatization of healthcare services, the current privatization drive may nevertheless result in the massive slimming down of the hugely overweight bureaucracy currently absorbing a disproportionate percentage of the NHS budget!
Hmmm... well, as I understand it, the bloated bureaucracy is directly linked to putting in places & maintaining the conditions for an 'internal market' in the NHS.... my guess is like US healthcare, more 'privitaisation' will result in more managers not less....
I would like to think so. From what I have heard, many of the the problems stem from Edwina Currie's tenure at the Dept for Health. She considered that the NHS was "undermanaged" and insisted on everyone having a 'manager' on their backs to tick boxes to make sure they had done their jobs. Around that time I did some work for the NHS and one of my contacts who had formerly been a useful troubleshooter and extra pair of hands where needed, spent his days, in his own words, filling in forms and ticking boxes! He said that in the past, they had confidence in people doing their jobs conscientiously but since Edwina Currie introduced her reforms, everyone has to be managed by someone to make sure they carry out their duties properly! My current contacts in the NHS are scathing about the quality of people in the lower, dare I say 'largely unnecessary', tiers of management.
