Uzique wrote:
there's also a fundamental difference of interest when it comes to employee-culture and union activity. employees of the private company (have to) serve in the private interests of the company qua company: maximising profits and delivering a service that pleases their management, financially, before it pleases their patients, personally. union organisation and affiliation in the private sector is based around defending the worker's rights pertaining to and against capital. in the public sector, health employees are far more hippocratic: serving the interests of the public first, with no base-line figures to meet (not involved with the financials at all in their day-to-day work). unions reflect this work culture and are equally interested in the state of the institution for its healthcare, not its profit margins and shareholder returns.
Perhaps in theory. In reality you get the same inferior product you would from any monopoly, except this one has a direct line to your bank account.
I'll take the service provided by a for-profit any day of the week. You two keep going on and on about shareholders and other nonsense as if it's the point. It's not. Those shareholders won't make a penny if the company isn't trying to increase its market share. The company isn't increasing it's market share by providing an inferior product or fucking over its customers. That only happens when competition is limited a la a monopoly.
In America, people go into government service for an easy job, a decent salary, a lifetime of slow upward movement, job security and a pension. It does not attract the type of person that will exert themselves to help customers, quite the opposite, in my experience they will put more work into getting out of work than they put into their actual job. Lazy, incompetent, these are words that the average American would use to describe their countries bureaucrats. Altruistic is not one of them.
