There’s a reason no other industrialized country has profit incentive buried inside its healthcare system — it’s stupid!
A corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. It could never see patients as anything other than a commodity — something directly impacting its bottom line performance. The more money a corporation can save on patients that it can return to its stockholders in the form of dividends, the better — from the shareholder’s point of view (and therefore from the corporation’s point of view). Profit incentive is why America doesn’t have a health CARE system, it has a health INSURANCE system. The first question we ask anyone needing help isn’t “How can we fix you?”, it’s “How’re ya gonna pay for this, Sparky?”
Not the same thing.
Profit incentive alters the focus AWAY from health care and TOWARD profit. How shocking…
Privatizing prisons is equally blockheaded. It’s further proof that in the entire history of the world, greed has never made anyone smarter. Never mind bullshit about “efficiencies”, it’s all entirely beside the point. The penal system cannot be detached from the justice system. The penal system must SERVE the justice system.
And the penal system should be focused as much as possible on helping those inside its walls to break the cycle that put them there. When prisons are part of the justice system, at least that’s a possibility. It’s not when prisons are in the business of being in business.
The ideal should be that we have no prisons because no one ever commits crimes warranting such punishment. That’s never going to happen, of course. But, if it could happen, it would put companies like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA — which California just banned, I’m pleased to say!) out of business. Keep in mind — CCA makes money only when there are prisoners in its prisons. The more prisoners in its prisons, the more money it makes. It’s therefore in CCA’s interest to either see crime rise (so long as its prosecuted) or for more things to be criminalized (creating more criminals).
One of the staunchest foes of marijuana legalization? Yup — the private prison industry who profits from having pot smokers doing hard time.
We should have killed the idea of private prisons at first whiff. We didn’t. I’ll bet greed was in the room at the time…