If Police and Fire is public, why not health...

[politicaladdict]

Someone on this post said that it's strange that when you call 911, two sectors, police station and fire departments, are public-owned and one health care is privately-owned.

What would it sound like if I said two sectors were city-owned but one, health care was federally-owned, how is that the same?

Why don't we ever hear health care being nationalized at the city level like police stations and fire departments, rather than the federal government?

And be serious, you wouldn't want to nationalize the police and fire at the federal level, would you? I mean, there's a reason why there's not much federal power within these sectors.

[John Dibble]

We already have this thread. Heck, right not it's still on the same page as this one.

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=100692.0

[Verily]

I'll answer here because the question is slightly different than that addressed in the other thread.

The answer is actually pretty simple. Policing and firefighting tend to differ by region/neighborhood/municipality/county, etc. Fires are a huge issue in the hills of California, but they're of little concern in the wetlands of south Georgia. Crime rates are very high in some cities but extremely low in many suburbs. However, people get the same diseases, illnesses and injuries at roughly the same rates nationwide.

Ideally, such processes would be as delocalized as possible. Localization, as those of us in New Jersey know, breeds inefficiency and redundant service. The abundance of municipalities in New Jersey creates vast waste in the fire, police and education sectors because separate administrations are run in each town.

In an ideal world, all of these sectors are all as delocalized as reasonably possible. Police departments can't be much more delocalized than they are now: The nuances of crime can vary significantly across a five-mile distance. Firefighting could be far more delocalized, centralized at the state level (which I would deem ideal), although at a national level climate differences make national centralization unfeasible. Education is a bit tougher; yes, quality of education varies significantly over short distances, but this is mostly due to financial rather than inherently regional concerns. Experimenting with centralizing education at the state level sounds like a good idea to me, with the possibility of centralizing at the national level eventually.

Health care carries none of the regional variations of any of these other government programs. Cancer rates vary but are reasonably similar everywhere. So, too, for heart disease, broken bones, influenza, and everything in between. State-level centralization might be a better solution--but that would require states to be proactive in implementing it, which they are not.