Health

Health is are area where I'd turn to others for advice. To quote the blurb from the end of Brooklyn Nine Nine...I am "not a doctor".

However, I can observe that there's a problem in Ireland.

While we have a system where the outcomes are pretty good, it's way too hard to get access to the system, access is too skewed to people able to afford private insurance, and governance of the system stinks (e.g. the prospect of old nuns on the governing board of a national maternity hospital).

Also, the whole budgeting process seems to be a bit of a mess.

What would I LIKE to see? And why?

I'd like to see more efficient provision of services, and I believe there's a role for market-provision of services in health, just as in other areas. However, since people don't decide to get sick and are very few have any competence to decide between a selection of healthcare options, a healthcare market would be probably the most regulated market in the world and would probably be a single-payer system (the state and/or some form of nationally organized health insurance. The Dutch have been trying a few things.).

Single-payer is like the NHS, which is fine in many ways. But look at the number of appalling scandals from within the NHS where people had no choice on where to be treated and no-one keeping an eye on the system. Post-code lotteries, all of that too. Not ok.

Then, full-on "market" systems like the USA where you can't get treated unless you've got money, where one of the most frequent causes of personal bankruptcy is medical expenses and where people like Purdue Pharma can do what they did? Also not ok.

So, I believe we need a hybrid system. Health care provision is done on some sort of market basis. Paying for health care comes from the state. It would take some working out. Bear one thing in mind....pretty much all health care services are ultimately provided by the "private sector" and "the market" anyway. The govt does not make tyres for ambulances any more than it makes syringes or MRI scanners. Those all come from "the market".

So...that'd be the direction I'd start in. And would be happy to be pointed in an alternate direction.