Sandy Clark, CGCS said: The role of government doesn't cover much beyond national defense, fire, police, roads, water, trash etc. Those are perfectly ok to tax people and business to provide the infrastructure for growth. The city, state or feds provide the infrastructure and business grows creating jobs for everyone. The people, companies or corporations take the risk, spend the money and build business that creates profit and jobs for those in the area. If schools were all charter or privatized or in some form, allowed to compete you would find them greatly exceeding the learning standards for the students. Health care is no different. Government loses to private industry every time and it is due to profit motive and competition.
So that's why insurance companies were dropping people when they got sick and needed their insurance in order to make a profit?
That is disgusting in my mind making a profit on other people's misfortune and misery? Please stop the ride and let me off now. Does their need to be an overhead for reinvestment? Sure there should be, but for a true profit motive, please, we are better than that. Part of the problem might be some health care has a different goal compared to insurance when it comes to "profit". Healthcare needs to profits to help improve facilities and treatments, and gets those by maybe overcharging, while insurance is beating them to get the best price for service and less treatments.
I disagree with the school issue as well. The biggest cost of schools are benefit packages, and it is my opinion that they were introduced to try and keep some good teachers in the system due to the lower pay compared to what they could earn in the private sector. Is some of it out of hand, or are there teachers that probably shouldn't be teaching? Sure, that is true in every job. But when you gut paychecks for educators are you really getting the best person for the job? Then what recourse does your town or city have to bring in another educational group? Schools are so important to the community and can be a big benefit to the businesses. Also would some schools in the name of profit not spend the money for continuing education of their facility? That would be like your course not sending you to the GIS for continuing education, yet we know through that process we either save the facility money or improve the bottom line.
I think we should be careful to paint the government loses to private industry statement with too broad a brush, look at space travel now compared to the 60's and 70's and what innovations came from that back in the day. Would private industry do it? They didn't rush to step into the void by the loss of the shuttle, I don't think so, there is not enough profit in it, or they don't want to wait for their efforts to pay dividends too far down the road.
I like the concept of private industry taking the risks, but look at tax breaks and other incentives government give to those companies to entice them to locate to their areas. So sometimes those companies aren't really risking anything. I don't think what is given away always amounts to the benefit. So before praising the private sector, really look at what they are risking.
Mel