Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

Re:Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain by red-iron-pine on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:26AM (#36681431)

> This is a pet peeve when market maximalists talk about how public services are "inefficient". Efficiency in economics refers to profitability. If a public service isn't profitable, that actually makes it efficient in a practical sense because a public service being profitable would mean it is overfunded (i.e. it's receiving more funding than it needs to operate).

Ehhhh... nah. There is still a cost vs. return.

Postal Services, for example. $10 ships 1.1 packages on average, or they get efficient and $10 ships 1.9 packages, etc.

You absolutely see this in things like Medicare where $100 worth of spending doesn't get you 90-100 generic aspirin, but more like 20 pills, and the rest of it goes to pay middle men.

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Re:Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain by hnbad on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @07:24AM (#36692929)

Yes, but economic efficiency measures profit, not "number of packages shipped per dollar". Also that metric may not even be meaningful in isolation and optimizing for it may lead to worse (social) outcomes.

The problem with Medicare in the US isn't that Medicare is inefficient. The problem with Medicare in the US is that the US has a private healthcare system and Medicare exists on top of it. A universal public healthcare system wouldn't perform the same way in terms of bang for the buck because the dynamics would be very different.

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