Thanks, @[email protected] for the usual thorough and detailed answers! Your effort to educate really is deserving of admiration.

As a fellow Norwegian, @[email protected], I would also point out (not implying that you are in any way unaware) some of the mechanics of how the public sectors in Norway serve the private, and in turn how this undermines the social programs over time.

In particular we are at a pivotal point with respect to our public healthcare system, where we have over time seen a rise in private clinics, culiminating in the somewhat recent “fritt behandlingsvalg”. In reality, the private healthcare providers serve to siphon resources from the public sector, while to a large degree giving less back to fewer people.

In the propaganda of the bourgeoisie, private healthcare is good and necessary for dealing with increasing waiting times for treatments. In reality, they are one of the main causes of it. This is why we need to analyze the situation in terms of productive forces.

1. We are educating doctors and nurses at a steep cost (I think one million kroner a year for each student of medicine per year amounting to six million for a degree).
2. We have a shortage of people in key sectors such as the public “fastlegeordningen”, with near critical failure looming as the work load increases to a point where no one wants to be a part of this system anymore, due to the personal expense. This is further propagated by the alternative of fewer hours at a greater pay in private alternatives.
3. The private sector can (over) charge both wealthy people for largely unnecessary treatments as well as hospitals that need to buy their services due to the increased load on the remaining people in the public sector. This answers how they can offer greater pay at fewer hours, by the way.
4. The private sector only provide treatments that are comparatively simple, leaving the lengthy expensive ones to the public. Additionally, the public sector have to step in whenever complications with regards to a procedure happens, for which the public hospitals take all the cost. See the second point with respect to unnecessary treatments for rich people such as plastic surgery and the recent news for real context.

All in all, my point was to demonstrate how the private healthcare providers prey on the public ones. This gives them an economical advantage that they in turn can use to increase their own surplus by taking and reducing (buying up) the publicly owned resources that were painstakingly developed by the state for public use.

I could mention other stuff as well, but what is really, to me, interesting is how the overall production of health services declines due to increasing privatization. At the same time we put in more money from the public, from which the private firms extract the surplus value by design.

All the while this is happening, the talking points in the political sphere is that private healthcare providers are the solution to the problem of deficient resources (productive forces that is, although it is not said aloud). In my view, this portrays some of the importance on why we need to educate ourselves. The how I think @[email protected] already have answered perfectly.