
For-profit, privately financed healthcare is usually worse for the patient.
One person in my circle of acquaintances was very highly paid and had the very best health insurance in the US. He contracted AIDS in the 1980s. Despite his very good health insurance, he was eventually fully insured.
Of the 29 hospitals with the highest quality and lowest mortality rates in the United States, according to US News & World Report magazine, 28 were non-profit, one state and none were for-profit. The majority of studies in for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals discuss care in the USA and Canada. Studies in hospitals in Germany nevertheless show a similar result. In one study, for-profit hospitals had tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths that were avoided in not-for-profit hospitals. In a study of nursing homes, the top twelve nursing homes were non-profit.
The welfare gains from private care have not materialized
The bourgeois leader writer Håkan Boström also writes about the results of the privatized welfare in Sweden in GP 2020-02-16: «The research is clear. Welfare gains have largely been absent. The fact that there are individual welfare companies that do a good job does not change the overall picture.» Boström relies on the fact that the privatization of welfare has neither resulted in quality improvements nor deterioration. He refers to the research institute SNS's anthology «Consequences of competition» in 2011 with Laura Hartman as research leader.
Now that privatization has not even according to right-wing information institutes such as SNS given society a higher quality of welfare services, privatization has only taken money that could have gone to patients and given it to capitalists. Now you might be thinking that small sums don't matter?
SEK 500 more a month as good as psychotropic drugs
Even small sickness benefit increases such as SEK 500 per month are e.g. as effective as psychotropic drugs for many, seriously mentally ill. Mental illness often doesn't start with people being odd, withdrawing, and getting a mental illness in isolation. Mental illness usually begins with poverty, which means that an affected person cannot socialize as much as usual with their friends and relatives. Then he tends to withdraw and become socially isolated. Then she becomes odd and finally mentally ill. Mental illness starts with the lack of good jobs for everyone and generous social insurance and benefits.
True freedom of choice in care should not, as Boström says, consist in replacing non-public with private care, but more in individually adapting the care to the patient's needs.
Should the poor, and many others, be left to receive worse care than the rich, perhaps no care at all or be insured to die even in Sweden? Voting red is, in my opinion, necessary for non-publicly financed and equal world-class care for all.
Read economic historian and researcher John Lapidus' book "The sick debate” about what healthcare we should have.