Food for thought
It's good to see people coming out against private sector involvement in healthcare.
Some things are too important, too fundamental to be left to the market. Imagine if food, say, wasn't completely controlled by the state.
Picture, if you can bear it, the scene. Instead of being centrally controlled by Whitehall, food production and distribution is largely undertaken by private enterprise. You get your weekly groceries not from the National Food Service but from a warehouse on the edge of town or a smaller outfit on the corner of your street.
What motivates the people who run and work in such places? Nope, not pure altruism, as one would hope and expect. Dirty, wicked profit, that's what. That's right - even though we're talking about an essential public good like food. It makes me sick (and so does the organic, ethically sourced, extensively tested crap they sell in "supermarkets").
Prices rise through the roof and quality drops through the floor, which is the inevitable consequence of competition. Those of us whose brains don't explode from having to choose between five different kinds of houmous eventually starve to death because staple items such as bread cost £25 per unit.
Mercifully, that's not the reality. Very shrewdly, we are persisting in this country with a food policy that is modelled on the famed and universally celebrated Soviet system.
We just need to do everything we can to ensure that evil capitalists have no involvement in healthcare. The idea of private companies funding ground-breaking research or increasing capacity in the NHS may seem too awful to contemplate, but we cannot afford to let our guard down.
What we need, what we DEMAND, is no reform whatsoever of a system designed six decades ago.
Some things are too important, too fundamental to be left to the market. Imagine if food, say, wasn't completely controlled by the state.
Picture, if you can bear it, the scene. Instead of being centrally controlled by Whitehall, food production and distribution is largely undertaken by private enterprise. You get your weekly groceries not from the National Food Service but from a warehouse on the edge of town or a smaller outfit on the corner of your street.
What motivates the people who run and work in such places? Nope, not pure altruism, as one would hope and expect. Dirty, wicked profit, that's what. That's right - even though we're talking about an essential public good like food. It makes me sick (and so does the organic, ethically sourced, extensively tested crap they sell in "supermarkets").
Prices rise through the roof and quality drops through the floor, which is the inevitable consequence of competition. Those of us whose brains don't explode from having to choose between five different kinds of houmous eventually starve to death because staple items such as bread cost £25 per unit.
Mercifully, that's not the reality. Very shrewdly, we are persisting in this country with a food policy that is modelled on the famed and universally celebrated Soviet system.
We just need to do everything we can to ensure that evil capitalists have no involvement in healthcare. The idea of private companies funding ground-breaking research or increasing capacity in the NHS may seem too awful to contemplate, but we cannot afford to let our guard down.
What we need, what we DEMAND, is no reform whatsoever of a system designed six decades ago.
posted by Tom Greeves at 6:45 pm
<< Home