In general private enterprise does a lot better than the government. From what I understand, there is massive overspending on healthcare in the US, most likely due to how insurance works. The obvious way to fix this is to just tax healthcare.
Your insurance is often payed by your work (I'm not sure how often, though), so you have no option to change insurance companies. If they let you choose your healthcare, you pick the most valuable. If they don't, they pick the cheapest. Neither results in the best deal. The only incentive is that you'll prefer a job with better healthcare, so your company will try to find a provider that can give better deals. It's kind of distant though. It's not like government healthcare has very direct incentives, but I suspect that the value of the two are similar, as opposed to the private sector being substantially better.
In general private enterprise does a lot better than the government.
Does it? Thats a pretty broad statement, and even if it does in general that doesn't mean it does in particular cases. The obvious counterexamples are natural monopolies, e.g. water, roads and I would argue healthcare.
It's not like government healthcare has very direct incentives,
The main incentives are voter pressure for better healthcare and the cost of various infrastructure and treatments. As the public generally demands healthcare be at least as good as it has been before, if not better, there is an incentive to be efficient in allocating cost to healthcare.
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.