Check this out. In villages near Madurai people go to primary health centres in good number only when crops fail, and they cant afford Rs 10 to private doctors, sending signs to HLL salesmen about how his business going to be in that season, and making a bigger statement about the state of free healthcare in the country.
A July 2005, report on Delhi doctors by World Bank says "doctors in the fee-for-service private sector are closer in practice to their knowledge frontier than those in the fixed-salary public sector. Under-qualified private sector doctors, even though they know less, provide better care on average than their better-qualified counterparts in the public sector." I know i am being unfair to thousands of healthcare professionals in government run hospitals, but i dont think i would be wrong in joining those who criticise how these hospitals and healthcare centres are run.
So, does that mean we will be better off if they are all run by private sector? It might be instructive to compare countries which provide socialised healthcare with those that dont. This piece from Economist website's new feature CORRESPONDENT'S DIARY does just that:
America is the only advanced country that does not have universal health care, with a "single payer", the government, organising the system. Instead, America argues that competition between private-sector insurance companies will cut costs and improve services. If only...
As Paul Krugman, an economist and a New York Times columnist, has pointed out, universal health-care systems minimise their risk by covering everyone, ill and healthy alike. Private-sector insurers minimise theirs by avoiding the sick. So woe betide you if you have a pre-existing condition. Bad luck, too, if you have a catastrophic illness and then lose your job.
At some point, surely, a tipping point in public opinion will be reached. It would help if America's bosses lent a hand: after all, $1,500 of the price of a car from loss-making General Motors goes to pay for health care. I remember interviewing Howard Schultz, the boss of Starbucks. Mr Schultz gives his employees, including part-timers, good health cover, but he also lobbies for the burden of care to be taken off employers' backs, and he cannot understand why so few other bosses are willing to join his campaign.
Perhaps the reason is that the obvious alternative would be "socialised medicine", a phrase that sets alarm bells ringing for the average American. But, as I say in arguments with bemused American friends, the country seems happy enough to have "socialised" roads, schools and armed forces. And what do they get with their present health system? They get lower life expectancy than in most of Europe, and higher infant mortality than in Cuba―even though, at around 15% of its GDP, America's spending on health care is the highest in the world.
None of this convinces my friends. They counter with horror stories about Britain's National Health Service, or the growing queues in the Canadian system. I cite France and Belgium in retaliation. The fundamental problem, of course, is that no health-care system can be perfect when demand is infinite and supply is not. But America sees itself as a moral country. Can it be morally right that someone hit by accident or illness should then be hit by an enormous hospital bill?
Your thoughts?
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