That and there's no incentive for the insurance companies to do good things. If given a choice of making more money or less money they choose more money every time.
My original comment made no sense. The dumbest people I've worked with were former public sector employees (ex US military). The amount of rote memorization, throwing shit at the wall, and general "just following orders" antics was hilarious and concerning considering they were breaking critical businesses infrastructure on a daily basis.
The most concerning thing with that kind of mindset is that they somehow completely forgot how to just follow procedures step-by-step exactly as requested when that request comes from the IT department.
And still it's not efficient if the goal is long term corporate profits (which is a shit goal but whatever), because the rich fuckers will steal from shareholders, too.
Capitalism isn't efficient! It's creates whole industries that have no other purpose but to lech off the system. Land lords, insurance, none rehabilitation based justice system, private/charter schools, car dealerships, military industrial complex, etc.
private/charter schools - provide competition for public schools, and generally both get better as a result; we like our charter school, but we only went because our local admin was driving teachers away (since been replaced)
In another thread someone pointed out that there's land lords and there's property management. Sometimes one entity is both, but not always. Property management provides value for money- i don't want to deal with maintaining the building myself, so I'll pay someone to do it. Landlords just make money because they happen to own the place, but provide little to no value.
Also private schools I think mostly are a vehicle for racism and undermining public schools. I don't think they're good.
Car dealerships is a weird one in that list. That’s like saying one should go to cuisinart to buy a toaster rather than Walmart. They’re a car retailer…
Uhhhh the car buying process is so different than any other industry that comparing it to buying a toaster is disingenuous. What if I told you, "you're not allowed to buy this toaster from Cuisinart directly." Not only that but you must go to a store with a mark up to buy the toaster. Would you feel the same?
I had this same argument 20 years ago when I compared private industry's efficiency to a Comcast call center. Four hours of hold for 'you plug back in and out?' and/or a disconnect.
Albeit I now work in government where we are culturally required to refer to people as 'customers'. Though people are always shocked when they get a response from a human within a week's time. The bar of expectations is low.
For everyone who thinks "users" or "clients" is dehumanizing, it can in fact get worse. IMO "clients" isn't even that bad as a way to differentiate people you are serving from those you are not serving, but I would never be able to accept calling the people I help "customers". We are not doing business, this is a public service ffs.
It's not just (time now required for task)/(time previously required for task)? So if it normally costs 4 hours to get a jug of water, and we build pipes to make it cost 4 minutes, then it's a 60x increase in efficiency.
In capitalism, you become more efficient the closer you get to producing nothing while charging infinite dollars to everyone.
If you have to charge 1/60th or less per unit of water and the market size remains the same, your example is less efficient, even if the pipes were free.
It really isn't though. Even if you take corruption and siphoning off profits as the actual goal capitalism sabotages the goal of getting the maximum amount of money to siphon off all the time through short-sighted policies in much the same way overfishing and similar short-sighted ways of treating common goods does.