I get really tired of the standard capitalist jargon that a business can be held accountable for its product by its customers, and therefore an informed health care consumer can hold their medical providers accountable by demanding good service, whereas a socialized system has no way of demanding good service except at the ballot box.
That's bull. There's just no other way to say it.
Obviously, the only motivation anyone ever has for doing a good job is greed, right? And therefore, voting with your wallet always works, because if you deny them your business, you're taking away the only thing that matters to them.
In my experience, most people don't go into health care - any aspect of it - for the money. The fact that the money is good is one motivating factor among many, but equally important are the desire to help people, the desire to do good in the world, the desire to solve puzzles and improve people's lives in the process. I'm sure there are doctors whose main motivation is the cash. I'm not denying that. But the vast majority are in medicine because they want to help people. The problems with doctors come up when the doctor has a different opinion about what's best for the patient than the patient has for themselves. But the issue is not one of demanding good service for the consumer of that service - it's in making everyone see eye to eye on what good service entails.
Then we get to the other side of the equation, and that is: in a private insurance-driven health care system, the people trying to decide what's best for the patients are different from the people who end up paying for the treatments. The people doing the paying are at several removes from the actual provision of services. The insurance companies often have people over a barrel. If you're in need of the services, that means you have some kind of condition that is being treated, and that in turn means many other insurance companies would either turn you down outright, or put you in a waiting period before you were covered. So they know very well that most people aren't in a position to take their business elsewhere. It's cheaper for them to risk the loss of a customer by refusing to pay services, than it would be to serve those customers well.
In a socialized system, you CAN go to other doctors if you're not happy with the one you're with. I've done that several times. The restriction is on doctor availability, not on who will pay for it. I wasn't happy with my first OB - I went to a midwife. I needed to see an OB later, and saw three different ones before I found one that would provide the service in the way I wanted it provided. And I didn't have to fight with my insurance company about certain doctors not being covered in their plans, either. I could have gone to any doctor in Southern Ontario who had room for me in their caseload.
The ONLY time when you need to hold the entire system responsible is when there isn't enough of a service to go around. At which point, instead of one person or a few people fighting with a company in the courts, you get public debate and public accountability, because everyone has a stake in seeing that things improve. It's a lot harder to write something off as someone else's business.
The capitalist model doesn't work for health care.
This rant brought to you from someone else's journal, where I politely refrained from directly engaging the person who posited the capitalist model, because the owner of the journal has asked me not to engage her or her me. Fortunately, this is what my journal is for.
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