I Will Deny You
1st May 2002, 05:15
As the last part of The New York Times' report shows, privatization isn't all it's cracked up to be. Championed by Republicans, privatization was supposed to encourage competition and bring higher quality and lower prices to, say, the energy market. A decade and an Enron debacle later, we need to focus not only on crises like California's last year, but also the victims of privatization who don't live across the street from a Judd or a Baldwin. The mentally ill were abused in state-run homes, and the solution was not to work out the problems but to forget about working and simply privatize everything. As the report (which is also available on the web) shows, mentally ill people were given operations that they didn't need, which were paid for by taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid. Privatization was supposed to be a shining example of how well capitalism worked. But not only are America's energy bills high (but not nearly as high as MUD support, of course), privatization has shown one of the major pitfalls of a capitalist system. What happens to the schizophrenics whose $2 per day "allowance" is stolen by the people who are supposed to care for them? (These people, by the way, are often untrained for what they're doing.) I'd like to know the solution that the capitalists pose for this problem. Something must be done . . . and privatizing everything isn't it.