Mexico’s 120 million citizens will begin to enjoy free, universal access to healthcare from next year, following a decree by socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum.
Every person has the right to health protection. The law shall determine the bases and terms to access health services and shall establish the competence of the Federation and the Local Governments in regard to sanitation according to the item XVI in Article 73 of this Constitution.
In practice, this has meant a bare minimum level of health care is theoretically available to everyone, but most working people have private insurance on top of that, or see private doctors. For the poorest people it has often been very difficult to get the care they need, even if it’s theoretically available and constitutionally guaranteed. It’s also different from American / Canadian / European hospitals in that family is expected to play a major role doing things that in richer countries are done by nurses or orderlies.
IMO, universal healthcare only really works if the middle class / upper middle class and the poor are all in the same system. If the people can pay more and get better care, they’ll do it, and the system used by the poor will be underfunded. You can’t do much about the truly rich. They’ll always just fly to other countries. If this is just filling the gaps between the various reasons people can use the state system, it’s not going to help that much, even if that kind of fix is necessary.
Any public service only works when there’s no privatization or outsourcing.
Public services, by definition, run at a loss; it’s not possible to profit from them monetarily. All benefits are intangible and derived from their social impact.
More innovation, more wealth production, higher productivity, less crime, better quality of life…
The moment you start privatizing, they stop working, as the only ways to increase profits from a public service are by lowering salaries and giving worse service.
When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.
But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.
For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.
But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.
Mexico already has a constitutionally guaranteed right to healthcare:
In practice, this has meant a bare minimum level of health care is theoretically available to everyone, but most working people have private insurance on top of that, or see private doctors. For the poorest people it has often been very difficult to get the care they need, even if it’s theoretically available and constitutionally guaranteed. It’s also different from American / Canadian / European hospitals in that family is expected to play a major role doing things that in richer countries are done by nurses or orderlies.
IMO, universal healthcare only really works if the middle class / upper middle class and the poor are all in the same system. If the people can pay more and get better care, they’ll do it, and the system used by the poor will be underfunded. You can’t do much about the truly rich. They’ll always just fly to other countries. If this is just filling the gaps between the various reasons people can use the state system, it’s not going to help that much, even if that kind of fix is necessary.
Any public service only works when there’s no privatization or outsourcing.
Public services, by definition, run at a loss; it’s not possible to profit from them monetarily. All benefits are intangible and derived from their social impact.
More innovation, more wealth production, higher productivity, less crime, better quality of life…
The moment you start privatizing, they stop working, as the only ways to increase profits from a public service are by lowering salaries and giving worse service.
When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.
But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.
For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.
But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.