US Federal Government

[Savy]

The hospital doesn't just eat the cost and that's the end of it, all these things go on peoples financial records and could ruin their credit at a later date. People who have kids with illnesses which basically bankrupt them. Isn't really something that should happen when it doesn't need to. People should have access to decent free healthcare.

[Renton]

The hospital doesn't just eat the cost and that's the end of it, all these things go on peoples financial records and could ruin their credit at a later date. People who have kids with illnesses which basically bankrupt them. Isn't really something that should happen when it doesn't need to. People should have access to decent free healthcare.

You have to look at the incentives and disincentives that are put in place by government policy. Yes, it is quite unfortunate that people become financially ruined by medical costs when illness or accidents happen. But when you have free healthcare, or pseudo free healthcare like in America as dranger described, you change the incentives a lot. The tragedy of the commons is applicable to free healthcare, whereby a person will be a lot more willing to take risks and squander his resources (in this case the resource being his life and health) because he has little financial incentive to do otherwise.

This also applies to education. People treat education much differently (read: worse) when its a free and infinite resource than when it is a costly and scarce one. It is obviously the latter even in the case of free public education, but it feels like the former in practice because no one directly pays for it. People on both sides of the student/educator line experience this phenomenon. Parents are likely to treat public school like a daycare to dump off their kids when they aren't paying directly for it, and educators are less accountable to parents and students than they would be if the school was a business.

Anecdote warning: In many high schools in my home state of Georgia the coaches were also teachers, and I don't mean P.E. teachers. At my high school all the social studies and civics classes were taught by the coaches. One of the most important subjects was being taught to 11th and 12th graders by these unqualified knuckleheads who might pass for 8th grade intelligence. I seriously doubt that would ever fly at a school which has a financial bottom line to worry about.