Every now and then various people in New Zealand complain about our health system and say that we would be better off if we privatised it. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re practicing reflex libertarianism, or free-market fanaticism, without looking at the actual facts of the matter.

Frankly, I’ll take our somewhat inefficient public healthcare system over the mindnumbingly expensive US private healthcare system any day of the week, or year, or millenium for that matter. Apparently, as a percentage of total GDP, the Americans pay more to handle the admin costs for their health system than we do to handle the entire thing. I think it’s all to do with the fact that private health insurance companies and providers naturally gravitate towards the formation of a system that maximises the public’s spending on health, and then they use the massive profits derived from that spending to pay lobbyists to ensure that the system stays bloated, inefficient and profit maximising.

Inefficient? Bloated? Surely an inefficient provider would be destroyed by leaner competition? It just doesn’t seem to work out that way. Perhaps it would work out if the health providers were competing with each-other, but in practice they’re mainly competing with all the other things the government and the public might want to spend their money on, and the people who pay the lobbyists in Washington are smart enough to realise that. ¹

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I thought about calling this blog “Musings On Technoprogressivism“, because that’s probably the political philosophy that most closely matches my own leanings, but in the end I decided to talk about philanthrogeeking instead so I won’t end up getting into arguments about what technoprogressivism actually means. Like most neologisms, there’s some debate^[1]. I used to call myself a utilitarian transhumanist freethinker, but technoprogressive is shorter

I’m very open to discussion on which parts of the general technoprogressive agenda are good, and which are not. I’m inclined to think they’re mostly all good. Or at least all mostly good.

[1] Don’t even get me started on “Web 2.0″.