I actually agree with you that something can be valuable and uneconomic. Your post office is a case in point. My business uses the post office in our village a great deal. It would probably close if it were exposed to market forces (and let's face it, it will probably close anyway). The service is valuable to me and to many others in the village, but this doesn't (IMHO) give me the right to demand that others who don't value it so much subsidise it in order that it can stay open. I don't agree about braille signs in hospitals. By making it more likely that blind people would use that hospital, it would potentially increase profits. Obviously the business is going to make a cost/benefit calculation, but the cost is relatively low so I see no obvious reason why they wouldn't do this. The same applies to advocacy services. If the government still didn't think so, they might choose to increase the value of the provident fund for some categories of people so as to make them more attractive to providers. I don't understand your point about money reserved for minorities etc. The money is in the hand of the individual patient - it's reserved for them. Or are you talking about investment decisions? When you talk about money being reserved for certain things, this is very much the way the public sector works. Private companies don't have reserved funds like this. They make investment decisions based on estimates of the returns available and direct funds to where they are needed most (ie are most profitable). If they have lots of things which require funding (ie will be profitable) they go to the markets and ask for more capital - "we can make a 20% return per annum return by attracting blind patients - would you like to invest?". You offer cheap ulcer operations so as to undercut your competitors. The incentive is clear. Providing complex and/or rare treatments is an issue which faces both state-run and private hospitals. Both have to deal with the fact that funds are limited. The market mechanism will not make this go away but does provide a rational way of dealing with it. If you have provident funds it's reasonably fair too. What we have under the NHS is people going without treatment because the budget for the year has been spent - you don't get treated because you became ill at the wrong time of year. This will not happen under a market, because funds are following the patient.

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