Public Healthcare Against Privatization
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- Published on Thursday, 20 August 2015 23:30
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1155 .... August 21, 2015
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Public Healthcare Against Privatization:
Lessons From the British Struggle Over the NHS
John Lister interviewed by Robin Chang
NHS For Sale: Myths, Lies and Deception by Tamasin Cave, Jacky Davis, Paul Evans, John Lister, Martin McKee, Harry Smith, and David Wrigley (Merlin Press, 2015) argues that the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 is a government policy whose component parts are together a significant step toward the privatization of Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS). John Lister and six co-authors demonstrate that the British reform debate about healthcare is polluted with myths about the performance of the NHS, how capitalist economies work, the proper economic and social role of government in them, and what conditions are required to maximize political freedom.
These discourses... are related and the mainstream views are used to justify and in the hands of some seek to even deny the existence of the expanding role of capitalist businesses, motivated fundamentally by profits, who want the production and distribution of healthcare to be determined by them. While economists advocating privatization argue that markets are more effective at compelling cost efficiency than the government can, critics have responded by pointing to the lack of evidence that markets are more efficient in healthcare. In particular, there are many properties of health services that make it unique compared to commodities that capitalists normally produce.
The privatization of public healthcare and other goods and services associated with basic needs such as education and utilities has been part of a general trend of neoliberal public policy. The neoliberal restructuring of healthcare has been occurring in Canada and the U.S. in addition to Britain, taking different forms.
