the war for privatization

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/war-privatization-1329146614

Can the pri­vate sec­tor re­ally do a bet­ter job than the gov­ern­ment? That’s what lob­bies in the health in­sur­ance, en­ergy, and ed­u­ca­tional sec­tors would have us be­lieve.

A Gal­lop poll from No­vem­ber of 2009 shows that 81% of Amer­i­cans were sat­is­fied with their per­sonal health care op­tions, as op­posed to the re­sults of a 2003 Wash­ing­ton Post-ABC News poll which in­di­cated over 62% of Amer­i­cans wanted, “a uni­ver­sal health in­sur­ance pro­gram, in which every­body is cov­ered under a pro­gram like Medicare that's run by the gov­ern­ment and fi­nanced by tax­pay­ers”. As of No­vem­ber 2011 Gallup in­di­cates, within a four point mar­gin of error, that the na­tion is in favor of re­peal­ing the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion’s health care re­forms .

Does this in­di­cate that over the last decade our pri­vate health in­sur­ance sys­tem has dras­ti­cally in­creased the qual­ity of its ser­vices? It’s pos­si­ble, but un­likely. Un­less there was a dra­matic shift in the Amer­i­can health in­dus­try there is no data to dis­pute the widen­ing gap be­tween the US mor­tal­ity rate and that of other de­vel­oped na­tions like Aus­tralia, as cited in a 2010 ar­ti­cle in the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine. De­spite the pos­i­tive mes­sage being put for­ward by spe­cial in­ter­ests, the pri­vate health care sys­tem con­tin­ues to de­cline against the pub­lic op­tions pre­sented by other first world coun­tries.

This un­der-per­for­mance is also true for the en­ergy in­dus­try, where dereg­u­la­tion in the state of New Jer­sey caused un­ex­pected in­creases in the av­er­age cost of elec­tric­ity as op­posed to the the­o­rized con­sumer sav­ings. Lack of in­cen­tive to im­prove fa­cil­i­ties con­trasted with few new play­ers en­ter­ing the mar­ket lead to poor ser­vice and ris­ing prices.