What is the ideaology behind privatisation?

[malificent7]

For example in healthcare is the ideology " it's your fault if you are sick so pay up so others don't have to?" Please explain.

Maybe in a different way
We have choices to make every day in our lifestyle, smoke drink eat processed foods lack of exercise etc
If you choose to make "bad choices" it massively contributes to many illnesses.

Privatising health might make us a healthier society as people would make better choices to actively avoid needing to use private care.

A society of health conscious people who make good choices would see an increase in productivity in the workforce, improved economy, and therefore more investment into social inequalities to help others level up

However that's just an argument I've constructed right now and I don't actually favour abolishing the NHS

It's about keeping taxes low to allow those who are richer to pay less and have more money to spend. They can afford private insurance so it's no issue to them. It's about abandoning those who can't afford to pay healthcare to a privately run system which the government can distance themselves from when it's all about making a profit so standards and quality go by the wayside and poorer people die or don't get the treatment they need. M

The nhs isn't perfect but it's a damn sight better than where we would be under a privatised system.

Money! Privatisation makes an absolute fortune. Healthcare is the biggest money maker in the US.

Say you need statins for life. Atm either you pay £8.50ish per prescription or it’s free. Under privatisation the company that makes the statins can charge say £800 per prescription. And make an absolute fortune. The govt takes a cut, and everyone apart from us the little people win.

It doesn’t make a healthier society, it just makes money. That’s all it’s about.

Looking at privatisation of other industries, it’s pretty much just to introduce a profit?

eg, I understand continental energy costs are lower than ours in part due to a profit not being baked in.

Same for trains?.

The problem is the myth that people cause most of their own health problems through lifestyle factors.

In fact, deprivation is the single biggest risk factor. Genetics also a big factor. Things like ethnicity play a role in what diseases you're most susceptible to.

It's such a right wing trope that your health is all your own making. It works because it supports the idea that you are therefore responsible for your own health and should pay.

There are things you can do to protect your own health, but frankly they are only risk factors not certainties.

Meanwhile it gives the privileged an opportunity to blame everyone for their own health problems and justify why they don't want to "share" their good fortune. It's a tempting position to take, but fundamentally flawed logic.

It's the idea that profit is everything.

Look at the cutbacks during 'austerity' it was all things that don't make a profit or are public services, even if it's just libraries or street sweeping.

That's why Tories/the right hate the public sector because they think can't understand the value in anything unless someone is making a profit.

Competition. If there is indeed allowed to be competition and not government backed monopolies. If you think private businesses do things badly, governments do it a 100 times worse. That has been proven over and over again. Privatisation is almost always the best way. However when it’s government commissioning a service through privatisation, they can’t even manage that. For instance railways. The fault lies with the government and inept civil servants.

The ideology is ‘There’s a service people can’t manage without, let’s make money out of them.’

The ideology is that money is a good incentive. So if profit is for the company/shareholders to keep, they find better/faster/cheaper ways of doing things, which could mean the service improves without it costing whoever is paying more.

Examples would be, for example, allowing the company to source its own paper/ ticket machine/ surgical spirit rather than buy at a standard cost.

If you are spending public money there is less incentive to make cost savings or long term investment as you personally/collectively won’t benefit.

The problem is that without minimum standards, costs are cut in a way that reduces service to some/ all people.

Eg unqualified teachers in private schools, delivery services not delivering to certain postcodes without a premium fee, fewer ticket offices etc etc.

This is such basic economic theory I can't believe anyone really struggles with it. This is one of those "I don't understaaaaaand" posts where the OP understands perfectly, and just wants to make a political point.

Just in case there are people who don't get it - the idea is that by introducing competition into the market, it makes things more efficient. Companies providing a service such as water, electricity, mobile phone service have to work hard to keep customers happy as they will just go elsewhere. When there is one massive company/organisation providing something there is no incentive to do better.

Privatisation is just more costs for the customer for the profits of the people at the top and the shareholders. Look at your energy bill or your train tickets.

People don't get it though. It's quite a fundamental ideological difference between old left and new right. But new left and also starmer are also for economic neoliberalism so not sure if there would be any difference now.

You won't pay for it, private companies rather than the state will provide the service. That's what privatisation is, not everyone having to pay for healthcare.

I've worked in the NHS and it'd work a whole lot better if it were run privately. It's contracts negotiated by managers who were skilled at the task and not the absolute buffoons they use now who know they just have to whinge to the government for more £, sometimes managers who have no financial background to manage budgets but are HCPs who have worked their way up the ranks.

We used to have to order everything from NHS supplies, the process was soul destroying and even more so when you know you could have bought the exact same product for half the price elsewhere.

They had contracts with food companies for basically ready meals, you'd have to buy hideous heating cabinets for these vile meals which were more expensive and less nutritious than an M&S ready meal which could have used a conventional oven or microwave to heat and be accompanied with a portion of fresh veg and fruit/yogurt for less £.

They'd bought photocopiers as they thought in their wisdom it was cheaper than renting but then you're charged more to buy toner cartridges and they were always breaking so you then had to pay a hefty sum for repairs, it was a no brainier but the same old 'We've always done it like this' was trotted out buy staff who with a little thought into the latter could have saved the trust thousands each year. It went on and on with idiotic ways to piss taxpayers money up the wall with absolutely no one actually giving a shit.

You don't get this in private companies, every penny is accounted for, they look into the most efficient way of doing things because they have a bottom line and need to make a profit.

Yes, someone gets it!

Nothing wrong with privatisation. It's the civil servants who run the pseudo privatised industries that are the problem. Proper privatisation works, it's when the govt/civil service interfere that we get the inefficiencies, anomalies and down right stupidity.

Look at the railways. Whichever clown thought it was a good idea to pretend to privatise them, but retain control of what stations a particular train can stop at, what prices they set, what timetables they have to run, even what trains they were allowed to use, etc. That's not privatisation, it's still state control. It's stupid that it was fragmented so that different companies own the track, different companies responsible for maintenance, different companies owning the stations that other operators use, etc. Lots of different layers of management all working to strict rules, prices, etc controlled by central government.

Same with the NHS. I have annual diabetic eye tests, and almost every year it's a different trust running them, meaning different locations, different staffing and management etc. Last year it was the local ambulance trust who must have "won the contract", before then it was a hospital trust that was two counties away! The waste must be monumental in all the contract tendering, contract reviews, contract administration & management, recruitment of staff and then redundancy at the end of each contract, etc.

It's not "privatisation" that's the problem with utilities - it's the way that the government control them.

Real, genuine privatisation works well. Look at something like car insurance - plenty of competition, low risk people/cars pay less, higher risks pay more so there's an incentive to change behaviour etc to reduce your costs, i.e. buy a cheaper car, drive more carefully to reduce accidents, etc. The car insurance industry would be a failure if the outcome wasn't linked in any way to the input, i.e. if there was a single price everyone paid to a single govt controlled insurance company - no one would care what they drove or how carefully they'd drive, as they'd get the payout/repair anyway. That's what is wrong with the NHS - there's no incentive for people to take care of themselves, have a healthy lifestyle, etc., because they know the NHS will treat them no matter what they've done to cause themselves their health problems.

No, privatisation leads to efficiencies as the staff involved, led from shareholders down through managers, etc., are looking to do things efficiently to save money. If they go too far, and the service suffers, they lose customers.

In Nationalised industries, there's no incentive to be efficient. In fact inefficiency is rewarded by the begging bowl with demands for more money to plug the gap. Customers have no choice so have to put up with shoddy service as there's no alternative.

BT is a brilliant example. Under state control, you could wait months for a landline to be installed and have virtually no choice of telephone. Now it's privatised, it's taken a long time, but services have improved with competition. In our road, broadband under BT was dire as it was old copper cables. Virgin came along and installed their wires. Virtually half our estate moved over to Virgin (you can see their boxes fixed to the outside). BT must have seen their customers leave in high numbers, so they've now come along to instal better fibre cabling, and now we have a genuine choice of which broadband provider we use, either BT's new cables or Virgin's new cables. Customers can make a choice based on price, contract length, and quality/speed. Before Virgin cables, we had no choice but to continue using the BT copper cable system.

I remember the railways before privatisation. British Rail provided a poor service, at very high cost to the tax payer, some of whom never used the railways.

The idea is that if railways are private and they have to make a profit for their share holders then they will be less wasteful, provide a better service to attract more customers etc.

However, railways also perform a social function in ensuring people can get to work, reducing traffic and pollution. State subsidy is necessary to balance the two sides.

In my opinion it's gone too far the other way and there should be more state subsidy, less focus on profits. In any of the key services, there's a balance to be struck, except healthcare which should always be free at the point of use.

The ideology is
•greed
•short termism
•abdicating responsibility

There needs to be an honest conversation about what can be privatised versus what will inevitably remain a monopoly even if switched to full profit incentive.

Healthcare can work well under some types of privatisation - look at how many European countries manage - but there has to be true competition. With how the rail and water companies were "privatised" in this country I'd wager we'd end up with the worst of both systems. No choice, no true competition, paying through the nose at source and still propping it up via the taxpayer.

Privatisation is supposed to lead to efficiency and greater motivation to attract 'customers '. But it also means chasing profits at the cost of staff, customers and general quality. Privatised health care systems can be barbaric. It's not what people want here.

To make organisations more cost effective/efficient

To encourage competition

Competition is supposed to make things efficient and therfore better and cheaper. Like i am very glad supermarkets exist and food is one of our most basic requirements. So it shows really basics can be brought to the masses by private companies. They rrsponded so well in the pandemic too.

I dont think it works for everything especially where there isnt really lots of different markets to provide for or different providers. Like you cant have 'less clean water for the price conscious' or 'we only pick up poo not wee to help your wallet' or 'our service is cheaper because we dump sewage into rivers daily" or our service is cheap because we havent invested in a new reservoir to help population growth or fixed pipes. it would have major public health implications. It just feels like a public service that should be publically accountable. Bit like the armed forces.

Yes you make some good points here

This is how it is supposed to work in theory. However there is an underlying assumption that ethics, competition, laws and penalties will keep greed in check. That is not true at present and greed has run rampant.

We all see how it is playing out in reality with the rail system. The private companies - including one solely owned by the Dutch government - are pocketing massive profits as services disintegrate before our eyes. I wasn’t in the UK during the time of British Rail that @MintJulia says was problematic, but perhaps she is right that a balance needs to be found. However the French national system is excellent in my experience.

Water is a similar area. Prof Jamie Woodward at Manchester University points out that only 14% of English rivers have an ecological status of ‘good’ and this is largely because of sewage dumping. The companies have been taking profits instead of investing in infrastructure.

My biggest fear with privatising the NHS isn’t ideological; I think certain hybrid models could be viable. My biggest fear is that it will be done in the same stupid manner, putting profits before people. This is why I think all major reforms should be resisted until the Tories are out of power. And then proceed glacially.

There are two answers to this. PP have explained the theory for private provision quite well. In simple economic theory competion drives down price.
However healthcare for example or trains are not simple goods. And both are or should be subject to quite strict legal regulation in order to avoid the providers making money at the expense of safety or wider harms to society such as pollution.
Also as my A level economics teacher told us no market in the real world is simple all have complex factors working on them. He was a tory voter but he said in a nutshell capitalism is like a psychopath trying to make as much money as possible. Capitalism can therefore only be trusted to run bits of the economy that aren't too important. And then they should still be subject to careful oversight so for example residential homes are not built in a dangerous way.
In the real world most equivalent countries to the UK have state owned utilities like trains and power in order to make sure they work and aren't too expensive, not out of the goodness of their hearts but because in an unequal society where the cost of basics like heat or transport is ruinously high it creates instability. The German government for example have a long institutional memory and one if their priorities is always economic stability because the opposite lead to the rise of the Nazis.
The political argument for privatisation like all political arguments is about belief rather than evidence. The right wing believe it is better and their writers and media outlets sell a vision which ignores both actual research and historical examples. As one of their number said " we are tired of experts. " similarly people like to argue based on anecdotes for example British Rail was worse. This was not the reason Major privatised the railways. It was political belief.