From what ive read, consumers are definitely not the beneficiaries in such arrangements. Why do governments do this then? Why give up ownership and control of vital stuff (e.g. water, utilities, highways, etc.) to private – and often – foreign entities?
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Services run by a taxpayer-funded bureaucracy tend to be much more inefficient than their private-sector counterparts.
I live in Canada where we’ve had public health care for a number of decades now and had an opportunity to talk to a retired American doctor about the differences between his experience as a private physician under the American system versus Canadian physicians.
He pointed out that on one hand, under a public system, everyone has access. Nobody in Canada goes bankrupt over medical bills from common injuries or illnesses. Here in Canada, if a kid falls out of a tree and breaks their arm, the kid goes to the hospital and everything from initial treatment through physiotherapy on the mended arm is covered. In the US, that same level of care could cost a family thousands of dollars out-of-pocket if they’ve been struggling to keep up with their insurance. That’s a massive bill out of nowhere. What good is big modern hospitals if the people who need them can’t access them without ruining their immediate financial future?
On the other hand, because everyone has access to care at no cost, the demand on our health care systems is higher. The funding available to pay for it all, however, is determined mostly by government budgets, not physicians or hospital administrators, so if there’s not enough to go around, the quality of care suffers.
The specific example the doctor gave me was that of the “annual physical”. In Canada, it consists of some blood tests, a urine sample, and potentially age/physiology related tests like prostate exams, mammograms, etc. It’s like an hour at a lab altogether and most of that is spent waiting. The last time I went in for my annual physical, the doctor’s office didn’t even call me after I had the lab work done because nothing had changed and they were ‘too busy’.
Under the private system, there are a lot more tests, the testing process is much more comfortable (more sedatives/anaesthesia available, etc) and then your physician will sit down with you and review the results in detail and offer counselling and treatment as required.
As much as some people would like to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way, there’s not. There are drawbacks and benefits to privatizing resources. One of the downsides is that it introduces a profit motive into something that people don’t like being profited from. But that, alone, doesn’t make privatization bad. It just means some people are opinionated and narrow-sighted.
The reason why some public services go private is that the private sector is more motivated to deliver. The reason why it’s sometimes bad is because people don’t trust people who are motivated by profit, so every single time a price is raised or a service standard is changed, they’re going to blame it on greed.
I don’t trust doctors in my area because they’re doing a very poor job and complaining a lot about how hard done by they are. If I was in a place like the US, I wouldn’t trust doctors because they’re expensive as hell and health insurance can be a significant burden. There’s not going to be a best outcome on either side.
It’s kind of a mess. It’s really only messy for people who insist on trying to decide which of the two is inarguably superior, because this isn’t the kind of issue that distills down to one side or the other that way.
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