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Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

economist.com

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Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#571

Post by supertimor »

refurb wrote: post #568
supertimor wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major difference in you’re example is that plastic surgery and vision correction are elective procedures. When your choice is eating the cost of an inflated procedure or permanent disability/death, it’s really not much of a choice at all. Most people will opt to pay outrageous prices rather than the alternative. Privatization may work for non-essentials, but when essential public services are privatized, it needs…

80% of all medical procedures are elective. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8542497/

Apologies. I meant cosmetic or optional surgeries (which is what you originally referenced). Elective surgery just means that it is scheduled in advance, not that it is a trivial or unnecessary procedure. Elective surgery covers everything from cosmetic surgery to non-emergency procedures like mastectomies.

But I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Many medical procedures are necessary even if not urgent, and healthcare costs in a privatized system like the US are astronomical. Emergency procedures and life-sustaining medications like insulin, that cost a fraction of the price in other nations, are bankrupt-worthy events in America. And people have no choice but to pay it. People’s health are being held hostage by these companies.

The number one priority of a functioning healthcare system should be the care of their customers, which is antithetical to a company’s priority of delivering value to shareholders and executives. And when your product is a basic essential and you have a captive customer base, it’s really easy to make huge profits by cutting costs and jacking up prices because you’re customers have no other options.

Most nations care about the health of it’s citizens, hence why every single developed nation has some form or other of universal healthcare. Because a healthy population makes a robust workforce and actually substantially reduces healthcare spending by the government.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#572

Post by brutusborn »

jamil7 wrote: post #28
brutusborn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think education is actually case where the free market would solve a lot of issues. Making schools compete for students would incentivise schools to provide a more valuable education.

You end up pricing people out of the best possible education unless you regulate heavily, at which point you may as well have state-run education.

You could use a voucher system where everyone pays nothing although I don’t think that would be optimal.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#573

Post by brutusborn »

tnel77 wrote: post #417
brutusborn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think education is actually case where the free market would solve a lot of issues. Making schools compete for students would incentivise schools to provide a more valuable education.

Who wants the “bad” students? Bad could be from a behavioral or academic standpoint? Don’t they deserve a chance at an education as well?

As long as ‘bad’ students have a voucher, you could ensure that public schools take them.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#574

Post by brutusborn »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #84
brutusborn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think education is actually case where the free market would solve a lot of issues. Making schools compete for students would incentivise schools to provide a more valuable education.

You want to provide quality education to __ALL__ of the population. I don't mean university level education. I mean real world education, such as how their body works, how to navigate society, critical thinking, cognitive biases, how probability works. If humanity is to survive we need to move away from empiricism and dogma, we need to move towards an educational system where kids grow into rational adults.

I agree, except for the move away from empiricism part, empiricism can be quite quite useful.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#575

Post by calessian »

perlgeek wrote: post #35
narven wrote: post #16

There's been only a couple of "privatisations" in entire world, that actually resulted in some benefits. Privatisation means, "you that don't give a fc... take care of that problem for me"

From my user's perspective, it seems that privatization of Germany's phone and Internet market has worked pretty well, and lowered prices all around. Though I don't know if that was because there was a huge boom of Internet access around that time, and telephony prices would have dropped anyway, or if that was one of the examples where it did work, inherently.

LTE/5G data is extremely expensive in Germany compared to essentially everywhere else in the EU.

Here’sa comparison what 30 EUR per month for you in terms of LTE data volume in 2016, and I don’t think there’s any real contracts with unlimited volume available for 30 EUR still: https://imgur.com/NXu0ZoP

Getting a contract for unlimited data with the German Telekom costs 85 EUR/mo currently, while it would cost 35 EUR on t-mobile.nl

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#576

Post by oarabbus_ »

captainbland wrote: post #447
juujian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even simpler than that. All of these privatized entities are incredibly efficient... at extracting profits from the public. Of course their goal is to extract profits. And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service. Bonus points if you can convince the government to bail you out and provide some extra cash.

Yeah exactly. In fact anyone who believes in markets should laugh in the face of private natural monopolies as an obviously terrible idea. The UK structures water provision as regional monopolies. This should be a hilarious joke but it's the reality. You can't change water company without living in a different region. There is no effective market competition for water provision in the UK. We already rely on price cap…

> The UK structures water provision as regional monopolies. This should be a hilarious joke but it's the reality. You can't change water company without living in a different region. There is no effective market competition for water provision in the UK.

This is how utilities/water work in the vast majority of the US. I’m unclear why you think this is strange? At the very least, it doesn’t explain the UK’s problems.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#577

Post by kazinator »

wolframhempel wrote: post #9

I am a deep believer in free markets as the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, creating better offerings and lower prices through competition and encapsulating risk in innovation. Unfortunately, none of these apply to the privatization of inherently public commodities that run on top of an underlying network infrastructure. This can be streets, railway tracks or water pipes - whenever there…

Streets, tracks, waterpipes ... mobile networks, broadband internet ...

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#578

Post by kazinator »

m-i-l wrote: post #170
juujian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even simpler than that. All of these privatized entities are incredibly efficient... at extracting profits from the public. Of course their goal is to extract profits. And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service. Bonus points if you can convince the government to bail you out and provide some extra cash.

> "It's even simpler than that ... their goal is to extract profits" According to the article, profit has not been the primary goal for the utilities though, because there is limited scope for extracting profits from uncompetitive essential utility services - the focus instead has been on maximising shareholder returns. So in the case of the water utilities, they "borrowed £53bn in debt while distributing £72bn to sh…

You left out the "to shareholders, the majority of whom are international investors".

A water company caring about some international investors more than the people they serve, and siphoning money out to those foreign interests, borders on treason.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#580

Post by mnd999 »

veltas wrote: post #92
mnd999 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimise investment to maximise profits, which you take, whilst running the minimum service required to avoid contract penalties or publicity so adverse you lose your contract. Then threaten to go bust and get bailed out by the government when the infrastructure starts to break a few years later. At least that’s they playbook they’re all using.

The infrastructure isn't privatised though, it's maintained by Network Rail.

There’s also water, energy, busses outside of London, Openreach (especially them), and pitty the poor people of Hull with that Kingston shitshow.
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