Privatizing Walter Reed

Ron Brynaert at Raw Story makes the convincing case about GOP passion for privatization of government services and the problems at Walter Reed. Jim Henley reminds me that I posted on the general problem here last month -- it's not as if there are dozens of United States Armies all competing against one another to run the best hospitals and choosing among a variety of suppliers of hospital services in a dynamic marketplace where the Army that runs a bad hospital goes out of business. You've got private profits, private corporations, privatization, and all sorts of other private stuff, but you don't have a market you have a patronage mill and you have suffering soldiers. The correct way to privatize government services if you don't think they should be provided by the government is to just have the government not perform the service. If it's something you think the government should provide -- medical care for injured soldiers would be, I think, an uncontroversial case -- then the government needs to provide it.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/03/privatizing-walter-reed/41610/