PHA-Exch> Is Private Health Care the Answer to the Health Problemsof the World's Poor? (5)

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Theodore H. MacDonald theo at macdonaldbn17.fsnet.co.uk

No, I cannot see that private health care can EVER be the answer, even in a
society where a proportion of the poulation 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 privatised
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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