The Indy Star has a story entitled State slammed for hospital plan. The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees came out with a report critical of Mitch Roob’s plans to privatize state mental hospitals.
Problems cited in a report prepared by the union include diminished care, no public access to information about what’s happening in the facilities, and the possibility of people who need to be in institutions instead ending up homeless or in prisons.
To keep costs in line, Fox said, the private managers, including not-for-profits would need to either cut salaries and benefits or “cherry pick” patients to avoid the sickest and most expensive.
Butch Collins, who has worked 15 years as a certified psychiatric attendant at Richmond State Hospital, expressed concern that the state’s plans will disrupt the care vulnerable Hoosiers have come to depend on.
“We’re their family,” he said of the patients.
Mitch Roob comes off as slightly ridiculous by trying to promote use of the term “localize” instead of “privatize” with respect to his plan to privatize the hospitals.
Maybe corruption at the federal level and with respect to the Iraqi debacle have made me cynical. Well, those things, and the implosions of big corporations like Enron even after it was able to defraud the state of California with engineered blackouts. But when I hear “privatization”, I don’t so much get relieved that the infallible business community will give us more for less. Rather I start thinking that transparency will diminish and well-connected rich people will get even richer off of taxpayer dollars while the services those tax dollars are meant to provide are gutted and the good jobs the State used to provide are replaced with McJobs with inadequate wages and no benefits. Eventually, you have a rotten husk where you used to have an infrastructure, and the corporation magically dissolves while its major shareholders skate off to Florida or Texas where they can buy gazillion dollar estates they get to keep as “homesteads” while they shake off the last few fleas of accountability through a quick bankruptcy.
So, maybe it’s not entirely unwise of Mr. Roob to try to change the terminology.
Leave a Reply