IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT BECOMING A BUREAUCRAT WHICH MAKES YOU A DEFECTIVE HUMAN BEING?

There is certainly no doubt that bureaucrats sometimes behave in almost subhuman ways:

To understand the following news report, you need to know that my home state of Queensland has a VERY mature "free" public hospital system. It goes back over 50 years. So it is reasonable to suppose that you see in it the future of all newer such systems. You see in it what the slow poison of bureaucracy eventually produces. Because the "free" system is such a shambles, however, an extensive alternative network of private hospitals and medical service centres has sprung up. And even the public hospitals have "private" wards where you can get better treatment. The following story concerns just such a public hospital -- one that has both public and private wards:

"Reader Keith, of Toowoomba, recounts a bizarre story of an imcident at a Downs hospital one night a week ago. He says a friend took her two-year-oid child to the hospital with a bad fever.

After the child was admitted, given a bed and put on an IV drip, the mother was given the "option" of going pubiic instead of private. It she agreed, however, they would have to take the drip out, then mother and child would have to go down to admissions and re-admit her child again, then go back up to the same bed, get the drip put back in by the public doctor. As there was only one doctor on duty, it would have been the one who had pulled the drip out.

Work that one out".

The above disgrace was reported in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on September 4th, 2005 in the "Good Mail" column

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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