This is how we notice how talking about “the payer” leads us astray. It directs one to think about the entire economy as if there were nothing else but trading between individual people.
The minimum income level and healthcare for retirees are organized publicly in practically all industrialized countries. Even in the United States, that model country for individual abandonment, there is social security (a public pension system covering almost the entire elderly population) and medicare (public healthcare covering almost the entire elderly population).
Decisions regarding such a system are made through the normal public sector decision-making process, and in republics, the strongest group is the one capable of bringing the most sympathetic voters to the polls. When talking about the affairs of the baby boomers (suuret ikäluokat), it must be remembered that there are many of them and they (unlike the young) are accustomed to exercising their right to vote.
This, by the way, is one of the central premises of the book The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival.
The interesting question, therefore, is not whether the public sector has the desire to provide for the well-being of retirees, but whether it is capable of doing so.
Fundamentally, the state has a monopoly on violence and thus the ability to persuade individual people to act in a certain way. In practice, the state mostly settles for threatening violence and steers people to pay taxes and otherwise act according to the laws.
In economic discussion, the most attention is given to the question of what kinds of constraints the laws of economics place on the state’s actions. We middle-aged and older individuals remember the talk of “market forces” in the 1990s, which did not leave little Finland much room for maneuver. In other countries, the state’s attempts to bend the economy to its will have sometimes led to disastrous hyperinflation.
My previous message aimed to reflect on this question.
My own answer is that it is all of these, in the same way that kuusi is a number (six), a tree (spruce), and your celestial body (your moon). That is, the word money refers to different things in different contexts. I am gradually leaning towards the view of this book:
You are absolutely right that our public healthcare is in crisis. I would argue that there are two big reasons for this: (a) the Finnish “payer discourse” makes decision-makers fear the wrong things by focusing on money when they should be thinking about the real economy, and (b) abysmal strategic management. The healthcare system has been driven into a resource-wasting, unwell state by decades of sub-optimization.
I was still wondering here whether I am talking so much politics that I should move the message there, and I went to read the thread’s opening post:
That reality was already stated back in November 2018.
Perhaps this discussion fits better here in this thread dealing with long-term economic trends. After all, this is more macroeconomic armchair philosophy than the stock market or actual politics.