Social Security & Medicare Notes

Chile - How is Privatization doing?

The Washington Post offered a description of the privatized system adopted by Chile under Pinochet.

The article is reasonably descriptive, but suffers from a typical journalistic attempt at "even-handedness." They offer a description of part of the system, a problem of that part, and then offer a positive aspect, then Continue to the next part of the system and follow the same pattern.

They draw no real conclusions and do not give enough total information for the reader to draw many conclusions, but I'll give it a shot.

The most significant conclusion I could draw was that few of the original projections about what was expected to happen worked out as expected. Especially, benefits are lower than expected, costs to the government are higher than expected, and not as many people are covered as were expected.

We really need to know more and have some experts interpret the results and offer comparisons to the US.

posted by Richard @ 6:19 PM