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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >In that we have you beat. Almost all highway construction up here lately 
> has been privately funded - either by builders for new subdivisions or by 
> consortiums that are slowly replacing our highways with toll routes.

A good observation of this, Gil, would be, would it not, that there are two 
ways of doing things (at least) and each has its advantages and 
disadvantages.  Toll roads are relatively rare here (although bridges are 
more common), 
and privately owned toll roads are all but anachronismes.   Going out of 
the town here to the county seat twelve miles from there are two massive 
limestone gateposts that in the 1920's supported the toll gate for that road. 
 
That toll road is all but out of living memory now and the vary idea appears 
in people's minds now of days (around here) as a repugnant curiosity.

My observation is that in our (US) psyche, we take government owned , run, 
and financed schools is a great blessing; government owned, run, and 
financed roads and bridges as a necessity; but a government run and financed 
medical insrurance program as being the chiefest of calamities!

We have a private trash collection in this remote part of the county.  The 
cost is a tiny fraction (it's about $11 a month) of what my city 
counterparts twenty miles away pay in taxes for theirs.  But the company 
which offers 
that service is in direct, fierce, arm's lenght competition with anyone who 
wants to offer similar services.  So the private option works very well.

But medical services are subject to no such constraints of the free market. 
 Even totally private service providers are part of a guild that 
collectively set high fees.  Even the ones who try to resist that system are 
dragged 
under from the guild's regulations (such as they MUST pay a radiolotist to 
sign off on xrays and utrasounds and licensed labs to do cultures, etc. when 
there is no need for anyone but the doctor to interpret the inhouse results). 
  We have no strictly free-market-vs-government model to compare in this 
case.

James