PHOTOS: Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman. Below: Former Alberta Health Services CEO Vickie Kaminski and current CEO Verna Yiu. Alberta’s health care community was abuzz this morning with word Alberta Health Services has renewed its contract with…
Continue readingTag: Privatization
Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Owen Jones discusses the UK’s experience with privatized rail as yet another example of how vital services become more costly and worse-run when put in corporate hands.- Sean McElwee highlights still more resea…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Owen Jones discusses the UK’s experience with privatized rail as yet another example of how vital services become more costly and worse-run when put in corporate hands.- Sean McElwee highlights still more resea…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.
– David Dayen wonders whether the Obama administration’s decision to end the use of private prisons might represent the needed start of a movement away from relying on poor corporate services as a substitute for public action:
Private prisons experienced more safety and security incidents. They had higher rates of assaults, inadequate medical checkups and compliance, eight times as many incidents of contraband cell-phone smuggling, and often housed new inmates in solitary confinement units, seemingly for lack of space. The report also detailed several grisly incidents since 2008: three riots in one Reeves County, Texas facility in two months; the death of a corrections officer in a riot in Natchez, Mississippi; and the closure of the Willacy County (Texas) Correctional Center, after inmates burned it to the ground.
It’s not hard to figure out why this happens. Private companies win contracts to manage federal prisons by undercutting the Bureau of Prisons’ operational costs. Unlike the government, private prison companies must also take their profit margins out of their budgets. The only way to make that work is to massively drop labor costs, corresponding to a severe degradation of the quality of prison management.
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That reflects the problem with privatization as a whole. Private companies must carry out a government function—be it water, parking meters, mass transit, or K-12 schools—at a lower cost than the government can provide it, while taking their profit off the top. Time and again, the results reveal that to be impossible, at least if you want to provide the same quality of service. Yet we keep privatizing. Whether it’s Republicans expanding Medicaid or cash-strapped cities handing over bus service to Uber and Lyft, eventually costs shift from taxpayers to the users of the services, oversight becomes impotent as officials grow reliant on outsourcing contracts, and attempts to maximize profits lead to service breakdowns.
– But CBC reports that the worst is yet to come in Saskatchewan as Brad Wall has publicly put SaskTel up for corporate raiding.
– Jacki Andre discusses the hidden costs of living with a disability – which make it particularly unconscionable for Wall’s Saskatchewan Party to be trying to squeeze pennies out of people who rely on already-inadequate disability benefits.
– Floyd Perras highlights the multiple factors that contribute to (and exacerbate) homelessness. And Rocca Perla comments on the need to include social determinants of health within medical treatment of patients.
– Pat Rich describes the Canadian Medical Association’s rude awakening in finding out that Lib Health Minister Jane Philpott has no interest in its key priorities for improved care. And Alison points out how the Libs are conspicuously trying to wriggle out of their promise to end the unfairness of first-past-the-post politics.
– Finally, Anna MacDonald makes the case for stronger transparency as a means of limiting the harm of global arms dealing. But if there was any doubt that the Trudeau Libs are firmly on the side of weapons proliferation, Helene Laverdiere points out their inexplicable decision to stand against nuclear disarmament.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Evening Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- David Dayen wonders whether the Obama administration’s decision to end the use of private prisons might represent the needed start of a movement away from relying on poor corporate services as a substi…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Melisa Foster points out why millennials should be strongly interested in a national pharmacare program:Today, young Canadians are searching for jobs in an economy with high levels of precarious employment, unemploym…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Bjarke Skærlund Risager interviews David Harvey about the history and effect of neoliberalism: I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt i…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week.- David Blanchflower notes that there’s virtually no dispute that the UK is headed into an economic downturn – meaning that there’s also no excuse to hold off on fiscal relief for the public. And Brad DeLong po…
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: How not to fund infrastructure
Recycling is supposed to be a good thing, so when the federal Liberals quietly announced that “asset recycling” would be part of their strategy for meeting their much-ballyhooed infrastructure promises, not many eyebrows were raised. They should have been. Asset recycling is an obscure code word for selling our public goods for private profit. It’s […]
Continue readingMichal Rozworski: How not to fund infrastructure
Recycling is supposed to be a good thing, so when the federal Liberals quietly announced that “asset recycling” would be part of their strategy for meeting their much-ballyhooed infrastructure promises, not many eyebrows were raised. They should have been. Asset recycling is an obscure code word for selling our public goods for private profit. It’s […]
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week.- Mark Karlin interviews Richard Wolff about the relationship between unfettered capitalism and poverty:How is poverty an inevitable by-product of capitalism? Doesn’t this make all these charitable drives “to …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading:- Ross Douthat (!) discusses the distinction between actual cosmopolitanism, and the global elitism that’s instead come to dominate international power relations:Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It require…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Danny Dorling writes about the importance of empathy and kindness in establishing the basis for a more equal society:When you cannot empathise with another group, it is very hard to think kindly towards them…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.- Mary O’Hara reviews Daniel Hatcher’s new book on the U.S.’ poverty industry which seeks to exploit public supports for private gain:(A) new book published last week by law professor and advocate Daniel…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Albert van Senvoort points out that poverty is more difficult to escape in Canada today than it was two decades ago. And Jean Swanson discusses the desperate need for more action from all levels of government…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On risk factors
Yes, “grasping at straws” is the right analysis of the Sask Party’s attempt to make excuses to gift SaskTel to the corporate sector. But it’s also worth noting something those straws have in common.Presumably any risk to SaskTel can be paired with an o…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- Sherri Torjman discusses how the the gig economy is based mostly on evading protections for workers – and how the both employment law and social programs need to catch up:Much of the labour market is morphing in…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- Hamilton Nolan interviews Branko Milanovic about inequality on both a national and international scale – and how there’s little reason to take heart in reductions in the latter if it’s paired with increases in t…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the Wall government is using a partial privatization of liquor stores to open the door to the wholesale destruction of the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority. For further reading…- The Crown Corporations Public Ownership Act is her…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading.- David Akin reports that MPs from multiple parties are rightly challenging offshore tax evasion – though it remains to be seen how many will actually demand a change to the practice. And Tanya Tagala notes that it…
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