Private healthcare done right

[quikchange]

In order to volunteer with kids at the local writing centre, I needed to get a TB test. A quick search for the nearest place that would conduct such a test for me revealed the existence of what looked like an excellent example of private healthcare at its finest. Curious, I decided to pony up the $30 and find out how well they work in practise.

Comments

[caffeinemonkey]

Do you include people who cannot pay in "emergency situations"? Not everyone would be able to afford all the procedures they need. Given that most people consider health care a basic human right, denying it to the poor does not seem right. Even "routine simple procedures" can be life-saving.

I'm glad your private health care experience was positive, but I personally cannot agree that private health care would be a good general solution. It fosters increased economic disparity and reduces equality of opportunity, two things which help keep an economy sustainable and competitive.

Many people then argue that "well, if you have the means, you should be able to use a private provider if you want." While this may provide an interesting debate, I think it fails to provide a general-enough solution. If the publicly-provided, universal system is bad enough that people want or need to go somewhere else, that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Think of it this way: if you are a software engineer (which you are) and you encounter a bug, you endeavour to fix it in the most general way possible, so that it is fixed in every place it could occur all at once. You don't just fix it in one place and hope it never springs up anywhere else. You write a utility function or class or whatever, and re-use that same, solidly-tested code everywhere you need to do the same thing. Applying the same principal, I don't believe it is enough to "fix" the long wait time problem by allowing the wealthy to purchase their own health care; that would ignore the "other" 80% of most modern western societies who do not hold 80% of the wealth.

[quikchange]

An emergency is defined by the time-sensitivity with which treatment is needed, not by the cost. That said, I certainly do not believe that it would be a good idea for our society to ignore the healthcare needs of people who are not fortunate enough to have a level of disposal income that would allow them to pay for non-emergency healthcare. But payment is a different problem and should be addressed using a mechanism that isn't tightly coupled to provider selection. Canada's universal payment system, for instance, gives everybody the same access to healthcare but still allows customer choice to dictate the success and failure of individual providers in the healthcare marketplace. The problem with the US approach to healthcare is that it's not possible for a new entrant to have access to the entire marketplace since the subsidized payment systems are limited to small subsets of providers.