Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] The future of eldercare in the US

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The future of eldercare in the US
  • Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:11:47 EDT


> >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




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page