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Comment by tux1968 | Hacker News Reader

tux1968

Could it be because it has to compete with the public option, or at least stand up to comparison with it?

Possibly, but there's also the fact that private providers in the UK don't usually cover emergency, ICU, primary care or maternity care. It's more of a top-up service to avoid waiting times on the NHS. They also have a tendency to drop their patients who suffer complications after surgery back into the NHS

It seems like it is not health insurance, but more of a health scam, if you can be dropped when if they find out you really need the money to pay for "complications."

Exactly! Competition is what makes capitalism work, otherwise you just have a monopoly and then everything turns to crap real quick.

We have a similar problem in a way with our trains. They’ve all been ‘privatised’ but if only one train company runs your route there can’t be any competition, so our trains suck big time and are really expensive.

Not only that, there's also only one Network Rail doing the maintenance. So the local monopoly on passengers relies on another monopoly.

End result is it costs upwards of £4k for an annual pass for a half hour train journey.

Add to that the fact that nobody would ever allow the trains to cease operating, and you have a really big question mark over what the point of privatizing was?

Do you understand what they were like when they were public? Costs have fallen dramatically, prices are actually way down, the govt subsidy is down (although will rise again with HS2), and service quality/output is up.

We know this doesn't work because we tried it and it didn't work.

I'm willing to entertain that thought, given a source.

Simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... - you can find other information/sources on the same page (not all of it is accurate but that will start you off).

This is the usual argument.

But it doesn’t hold water. France, Germany, Spain all have cheap, really good government-owned trains - in fact they also operate some of our trains in the UK and use the profit to fund their own trains.

Prices have gone up by the maximum operators are allowed to increase them every year (there’s a 1 year exception where I think they were frozen for political reasons) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49331238

Just because we tried something before and did it badly doesn’t mean it won’t work in future if done well. Execution is everything, right?

Left out is the specific reason why you think it will work well in the future.

Define really good? They are less safe, the prices charged to consumers may be lower but what is the overall subsidy (I understand that you want other people to subsidise your commute...other people tend not to be happy about this), and it is fair to say that UK trains are less punctual but the difference is not massive (and we do come ahead of the nations you mention some years too).

The discussion on this in the UK is pathetically weak, and largely a function of trade union lobbying (if you didn't know, the TUC pours money into this cause like nothing else...presumably they just really really care about commuters).

The even worse part is that the government funds network rail. So we have privatised the parts that make money and kept public the bit that costs money.

Competition in the UK railway system isn’t about competition for consumers, but competition for the long-term contracts for operating services. This is a totally valid form of competition and does not mean that a monopoly exists in the sense you seem to think it does.

I disagree completely.

For a business to be good for customers it needs to be accountable to those customers. These businesses are only accountable to governments and even then only ever X years when the contract comes up for review. Their motivation is therefore to service the government not the customer and the customer suffers.

Governments are the customers.

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