Costly Efficiencies: Health Care Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Health Care Debate

Christopher Mouré

Review of Capital as Power, 2022, vol. 2, issue 2, 17-45

Abstract: * Winner of the 2022 RECASP First Essay Prize * Proponents of private healthcare often claim that the private sector is more ‘efficient’ at delivering healthcare services. This paper tests the privatization thesis in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a large sample of countries, I investigate how healthcare privatization affects the correlation between COVID-19 death rates and healthcare spending (as a share of GDP). In countries with healthcare that is mostly public, I find no correlation. However, in countries with significant healthcare privatization, I find that greater healthcare spending was associated with more COVID-19 deaths. This result is consistent with the theory of ‘capital as power’, which argues that to earn profits, the private sector seeks to strategically limit the provision of social goods.

Keywords: capital as power; COVID-19; health; profit; sabotage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:caprev:253655

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