Privatization Kills

Digby nails it:

Here's a little taste of what your average senior will have to deal with when she's on Ryan's "voucher" program or when the whole Medicare system is privatized.

Reporting from Indianapolis— Louise Cohoon was at home when her 80-year-old mother called in a panic from Terre Haute: The $97 monthly Medicaid payment she relied on to supplement her $600-a-month income had been cut without warning by a private company that had taken over the state's welfare system.

Later, the state explained why: She failed to call into an eligibility hot line on a day in 2008 when she was hospitalized for congestive heart failure.

"I thought the news was going to kill my mother, she was so upset," said Cohoon, 63. Her mother had to get by on support from cash-strapped relatives for months until the state restored her benefits under pressure from Legal Services attorneys.

That's brought to you from the people who say "government can't do anything right."

So how did this happen, you ask? Well ... it's good old-fashioned corruption, all dressed up in a fancy new name called "privatization."

Cohoon's mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was one of thousands of Indiana residents who abruptly and erroneously lost their welfare, Medicaid or food stamp benefits after Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels privatized the state's public assistance program — the result of an efficiency plan that went awry from the very beginning, the state now admits.

Though the $1.37-billion project proved disastrous for many of the state's poor, elderly and disabled, it was a financial bonanza for a handful of firms with ties to Daniels and his political allies, which landed state contracts worth millions.

[...]

It's an issue that is likely to persist, as Republicans in statehouses nationwide turn to private companies as they seek to shrink government and weaken the hold of public-sector unions.

And any attempts to rein in such boondoggles will inevitably be attacked as "regulations."

You have to read the whole article to understand just how corrupt these processes are. And for all the talk about local control and smaller bureaucracies, the companies they are contracting with are national and their size is huge.And a bunch of people are getting rich off these tax dollars while the people the programs are designed to serve are getting the shaft.