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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (22905)	12/16/2004 9:31:35 AM
From: Carolyn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

I agree. Doesn't California have a commission which oversees the utilities? As for health care, you should see what is happening at the hospital down the street where my husband practiced. The nurses are on strike because the hospital wants to replace the RNs with techs who used to be cleaning staff!!! It is all money-driven.

To: Lady Lurksalot who wrote (22905)	12/16/2004 10:09:49 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Carolyn, although I am a diehard capitalist, I do believe that some entities should not be publicly traded and thereby be motivated by profits. To my mind, public utilities and health care are among those. - Holly The closer we can get any market to resembling a competitive one, the more efficient the outcome. Public utilities being either private or government owned, as opposed to publicly/investor owned, does nothing to make them more efficient. Traditional regulation does that to some degree, but the objective is usually just enforcing a non-monopoly price-quantity equilibrium - typically average cost pricing. But there are still inefficiencies and, importantly, distorted incentives. Innovation is generally lacking. The trick is to find ways to introduce competitive market mechanisms wherever possible and that is being/has been done in many markets once thought to be natural monopolies - telecommunications being the one taken the farthest along this path, but gas and electric services have been moving that way as well. In any case, "socializing" them is no solution. And that goes especially for health care. There IS NO natural monopoly there. Furthermore, if that's not the argument you'd make in this industry, health care is also NOT a "public good" that would be undersupplied without government intervention in markets. We have the most open and competitive health care industry in the world, and we have the best health care in the world as a result. Regards, Bob