Your statement was a description of the quality of government health care. Your argument provided possible reasons the government would have behind offering better care, but it didn't really back up your initial statement. If your introduction was, "The incentive for governments to provide quality health care is more reliable than the incentive for private systems," than the argument would fit. As it is your argument is just speculation on the motivations behind health care providers.
Also, I could be wrong, but I thought the government only helps pay for health care, and could only control its accesibility, not its actual quality. Wouldn't the state have to own the hospital to alter the actual care?
Wouldn't the state have to own the hospital to alter the actual care?
In fact, that's how the UK's NHS works. It's like the US's VHA, where the government actually provides health care. It's unlike the US's Medicare, which is "single-payer" because the government pays for everything, but the money goes to private hospitals and doctors who actually provide the health care.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialized_medicine for more information. From the latter:
...The original meaning was
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.