Why competition in the Health Service is bad news for patients.
Everyone knows competition is good. Its why we have amazing smart phones
(and why the East Germans had to put up with Trabants). So competition in
health care should also be good. It is an unexamined assumption of our time that
competition will make things better in any area. But is it really so? Like so many
things, it is all a lot more complicated and depends crucially on the specifics.
Competition, it turns out, is great in consumer electronics and lousy in health
care. This is why:
The other side of this imbalance of information is that in a market driven health care
system there is huge power in the hands of the providers of care which can be and is
abused. two recent examples:
● A for-profit hospital chain in Florida has been found to have been performing
dangerous and unnecessary heart procedures to increase its business.
http://www.newser.com/story/151577/money-driven-hospital-chain-allowed-s[URL][/URL]
hady-cardiac-work.html
● Senior doctors in German transplant centres have been lying about the condition
of their patients to fiddle the priorities for available donated organs - some at least
directly gaining financially.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/09/mass-donor-organ-fraud-germ