An inquest is needed into this healthcare failure

You're trying really hard to equate a doctor being paid a salary with the entire hospital being structured as a privately-owned corporation under capitalist ownership.

Structuring a hospital along for-profit lines has two major problems, as I see it.

First, it creates a strong pressure on the hospital administration, unsurprisingly, to generate profit. Their #1 responsibility in their jobs, and what their employers will want to hear about at board meetings, is not the healthcare efficiency they provide in terms of dollars-per-life-years, nor about the quality of care provided. Their #1 responsibility is to generate a profit.

When the quality of a product or service from most businesses becomes shit because management became completely focussed on short-term profits and gains, you buy it, are disgusted with that company, throw out what you bought, and maybe never buy from them again. In health care, a business that does that means you might die.

Second, the usual private mechanism of holding a business accountable is to stop buying from them, but private healthcare often resembles a monopoly. A small town cannot support more than one hospital, and for rare specializations, there may only be one or two specialists in the city or even the whole country.

Private hospitals are not, even indirectly, accountable to the patients. Under public ownership, the patients are shareholders, and in theory, if things go to shit they can apply pressure as owners through the government or local health administration, to fix things. Doesn't always work, but it's sure more accountability than in private ownership, where they're not accountable to you whatsoever. If a private hospital were the only game in town, and their services were absolute shit, who would you turn to?

/r/toronto Thread Parent Link - thestar.com