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It feels needless to me to criticise more the means of provision of the service than the level.
This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology / idealism imo. I'm with you - I can see the value in public ownership, private enterprise, and public private partnership, they're just different tools which should be used in different situations. But I think many people make a fetish of public services in the same way the tories do for private enterprise, when the reality is that each has its own strengths. Anyone who's worked for the NHS knows that it's an incredibly wasteful organisation. Anyone who's worked in private enterprise knows that the efficiencies often come at the expense of the workforce. Done right, public-private partnerships might be the best of both worlds; done badly it can be the worst of both.
ReekBlefs-
Anyone who's worked for the NHS knows that it's an incredibly wasteful organisation.
I work for the NHS and would argue the complete opposite. Delivering an acceptable service while under-resourced and under-staffed is the norm. I wouldn't call that wasteful, unless you call it a waste of potential.
Procurement is usually cited when talking about waste in the NHS, which is true, it's often arbitrarily exorbitant, and that's what you see in the media along with poorly run Trusts, but the service level cost is very low across the board and still delivers far more comprehensive healthcare than any single private provider ever will.
neu
Ok. Maybe this is what particularly distinguishes me from many on this thread, in that I genuinely don't care who provides services if they are provided for a good price, and publicly funded.
I don't really see why that is 'radical', or even actually particularly centrist, if it's a means to increasing the provision of state funded services to people overall.
It feels needless to me to criticise more the means of provision of the service than the level. (And the right are equally guilty when they argue that the state shouldn't own anything so things being privatised is inherently good).
I do completely agree that a lot of the time, a market solution doesn't work for things we typically want to be provided. But that's a different argument to the one you seem to be making.