In June 2017 64 people died in a forest fire in central Portugal; the main reason was because the Portuguese emergency communications system is run by a private company. Guess what, the system failed. So definitely no, private companies can not run their business however they feel.
My view is that some services are just too vital to be left to the profit motive. Health, police, fire, trains, electricity, gas are just some that come to mind. How to pay for those? By not wasting tax money on our lazy citizens and many foreign governments abroad, and by precluding trade union militancy within those services from the start.
It seems to me that successive right-wing governments are terrified of industrial action in those sectors, and that's why they are happy to farm them out whenever they can: they can sit back and look the other way and, if pushed, shrug it off as not their fight. From the perspective of the left, the perfect set of tied-in voters would then exist, along with the circumstances for beer and pork pies in Downing Street once more. Oh, and perhaps another token pop star or two, just for old time's sake. You couldn't make it up unless you'd lived through the Wilson and Callaghan era and noted the games of one Mr Blair. And to think that each and every one of them got there by the ballot box.
There is something seriously wrong with democracy!
;-)
Rob