Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesB
You seem to be very invested in big government. There are very few things that only government can provide, and nothing they provide is done more efficiently than the private sector. If you can provide an example I would be glad to argue the point further, but really this is nonsense.
WRT education, I would rather have a lower tax burden and be able to choose an expensive private school. The NDP provided a perfect example of exactly what is wrong with public education. This province spent addition billions on the issue and managed to reduce class sizes by 1! If class size is an important metric why can it not be reduced? Yet the bureaucracy that deals with Education continues to grow at an astounding rate, use up resources that should be directed towards students and generates bureaucratic inertia that maintains the status quo. Why is it that private schools manage to have smaller class sizes?
I also want access to high quality health care, but much of what I have been forced to deal with has not been particularly good quality at all. Furthermore I am never given the option to seek alternate opinions or treatments. It is always take it or leave it. Again I would much rather have lower taxes and pick and choose my medical service provider.
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Yea about that, I am not sure where you got your sources from but there have been numerous studies and studies of those studies comparing efficiency of the private sector with the public sector, and they paint a different picture.
The largest and most notable study is the PSIRU, which concluded that there is no notable difference in efficiency of the private sector compared to the public one, and most times quite the opposite.
Some notable quotes for the ones that don't want to take the time to read it:
"The consistent conclusion: there is no evidence of greater efficiency.2 So, the best outcome one can hope for is that private-sector ownership or involvement is no worse than what the public sector provides – hardly a turn-up for the books. The largest study of the efficiency of privatized companies looked at all European companies privatized during 1980-2009. It compared their performance with companies that remained public and with their own past performance as public companies. The result? The privatized companies performed worse than those that remained public and continued to do so for up to 10 years after privatization."
"Even in the super-competitive telecoms sector, where customers have benefited from lower costs and increasing variety of services over the years, this result holds. A global survey found that ‘privatized sectors perform significantly worse’ than telecom companies remaining in state hands."
"Healthcare is where this myth is really given the lie. In the US, where healthcare spending is at its peak, with private spending on healthcare exceeding public spending, basic health outcomes are worse than in Cuba – which spends a fraction of the US amount per person in a totally public healthcare system (see table).
Myth 5 table
A 2012 report by the US Institute of Medicine was damning:
‘30 cents of every medical dollar goes to unnecessary healthcare, deceitful paperwork, fraud and other waste. The $750 billion in annual waste is more than the Pentagon budget and more than enough to care for every American who lacks health insurance… Most of the waste came from unnecessary services ($210 billion annually), excess administrative costs ($190 billion) and inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion).’2
That same year government had to step in with the Affordable Care Act (also known as ObamaCare) to try to rectify a bloated system that was clearly failing poor citizens."
Luckily most people side with evidence rather than assumptions. I mean you really don't have to be a genius to see that a private corporation will have one goal only, and that's profits at all costs and the interests of the shareholders. In most cases there is no substitute, let alone better alternatives to the public sector. For the people by the people as they say. Yes, it's not perfect and has shortfalls but everything does touched by human hands.