Well, if we can make up incentives then we can come up with scenarios to make anything look bad. Let's judge public equivalents: Prisons - the US has the bigge

Well, if we can make up incentives then we can come up with scenarios to make anything look bad. Let's judge public equivalents: Prisons - the US has the biggest prison population in the world. Private prisons are becoming a more lucrative business because of the failure of public prisons to manage the prison population. It's clear that public prisons already had incentive for (or no incentive against) longer sentences. Schools - the schools have little incentive to teach kids well. Kids in the US fall further behind of their international counterparts. Perhaps public schools are already teaching at a slower rate? In any case, public schools resist tooth and nail any attempt to have them cede kids, territory, and power to private/charter schools. Hospitals - today in America they are facing huge liabilities due to patients' inability to pay. Keeping patients as long as possible only helps the hospital if patients are actually able to pay for all that treatment, which, seeing how health care was such a hot button issue for the past six years, does not seem to be the case. Some things, we should question whether it's in our best interests to maintain the status quo (keep them public).