Dear Colleagues,
No, I cannot see that private health care can EVER be the answer, even in a society where a proportion of the population can afford it. For anyone, anywhere to actually make profit out of treating the ill has to be immoral. Why? For so many reasons, but principally because the profit cleared in the transaction is lost to healthcare. Since access to health care is a basic human right, all money directed to it should be spent on it. Private medicine requires a profit. That's why it has to be state run. I can never understand why most people feel that, while education should be available to all, health shouldn't. It defies any kind of logic.
Just live in the US for a few years, preferably with a family, and one soon realizes that even in wealthy societies, the existence of privatized healthcare creates a two-tier system. In the UK, the NHS - crippled and underfunded as it is- still offers better nursing than does the private sector in many instances! But in such wealthy first world societies, the issue may appear to be merely "a matter of opinion". That is not true in less developed countries, in which private insurance schemes of one sort or another, not only waste a large proportion of facilities paid for out of taxation, but regularly kill off many of the poor.
I would think that a good working principle is that anything at all that is essential to human dignity must never be a source of personal profit.
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Theodore H. MacDonald
mailto:theo@macdonaldbn17.fsnet.co.uk