Which is why it should be the private sector which is generally not in control of laws and such rather than the public sector which happily and easily regulates and commandeers those things at their whim.
Well, no. It should be the public sector who is in charge of the laws and in charge of breaking monopolies and preventing regulatory capture, not the private sector who is in charge of the laws which they then use to establish regulatory monopolies and rents, which is what we have in the United States.
The private sector has a profit motive to gain control of legislature, not to increase competition and drive down prices.
Except that everyone working at the company gets paid and all the investors get their expected return on investment.
That's not a response to the dilemma I posted.
This is complete and utter bullshit.
No, it's complete and utter truth. For a health insurance company, premiums are income and health care expenditures are costs. Therefore, maximizing profit - which is income minus costs - means maximizing premiums and minimizing costs. That means increased premiums, establishing a client base consisting only of the healthiest, most affluent clients, and generally denying medical care or cancelling coverage where contractually permissible.
It's the "adverse selection" problem - people generally need either no medical care, or need an expensive amount of it. Most people who make claims have not paid premiums in excess of their claims (otherwise they'd just have used a savings account.) Therefore the most profitable way to run a health insurance company is to collect premiums from people who never get sick.
Building a hospital and employing highly educated and trained medical professionals at great cost and then having them stand around doing fuck-all is the least profitable way to operate.
No, it's the most profitable, because the marginal costs of providing medical care - pharmaceuticals dispensed, bandages used, bedpans cleaned - are larger than the marginal costs of paying doctors to stand around and do nothing - coffee and magazines, basically - and then bill insurance companies or the government for it.
You seem to be denying that there is a market for effective schools
Right. There is no market for effective schools; there's only a market for
selective schools. That's why all of the measurable benefit in for-profit private secondary and primary schools is in the admission process; after students are admitted, the educational improvement at private schools is no different than at public schools. The only measurable "benefit" to a private school education is as a market signal that you were "good enough" to pass a more selective admissions filter.
"Failing" in what way?
"Failing" in that prisoners are subject to abuse and neglect. Failing in that prisoners escape instead of not escaping. Failing in that prisoners are not rehabilitated. The profit basis in running a private prison is in informing the government that a certain number of beds are filled, not in actually having prisoners in those beds, or being fed, or living in a safe and clean environment. Since private prisons aren't actually paid for any of that, they have no reason to do so.
oh wait, if its a public sector job there *are* no competitors are there?
Why not? The government runs the Post Office, and then there are at least three private-sector competitors that deliver less efficient, less effective service at about ten times the price. (Don't know how they stay in business, honestly. Probably huge government subsidies - another example of the private sector's profit motive working directly against efficiency.)
Right, because the one organization that gets the largest chunk of your paycheck isn't a government.
They earned it, and I get to tell them how to spend it. Funny - my landlord keeps neglecting to ask me how to spend those huge rent checks I keep writing every month. That seems a lot less efficient, frankly.
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