Of Course There Is No Legal Basis, It’s Peter Thiel

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is trying to create what it calls a, "Federated Data Platform," to manage information in its sprawling healthcare system.

They contracted this out to Palantir Systems, the data analytics firm that has been notorious for opaque deals with intelligence and law enforcement agencies to engage in spying that would not be legal for its clients to conduct themselves.

It appears that critical parts of this program have no legal basis, according to both internal legal documents and lawsuits filed by privacy advocates.

This is not a surprise.  Thiel is a lawless individual who has expressed his contempt for the NHS, so abusing a few tens of millions of Brits is of no concern to him:

NHS England has received advice from lawyers saying key aspects of its controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP) lack a legal basis, meaning that unless a solution is found, it must allow citizens to opt out of sharing their data.

The FDP is being built by US spy-tech biz Palantir following the award of a £330 million seven-year contract by NHS England, a non-departmental public body under the Department of Health and Social Care. The total four-year budget for the project is actually £485 million, The Register revealed weeks ago.

In December last year, a group of campaign organizations led by Foxglove began preparing a legal challenge alleging there is no lawful basis to create the FDP, as described in procurement documents, within the current legal directions used to obtain and share data within the NHS.

At the time an NHS spokesperson said: "This letter fundamentally misunderstands how the Federated Data Platform will operate and is totally incorrect in both matters of law and fact."

However, documents shared with the FDP board in March show that NHS England had received legal advice showing a vital aspect of the program – its privacy-enhancing technology (PET), to be provided by IQVIA – lacked a legal footing to proceed.

Board documents seen by The Register state that NHS England got the advice from King's Counsel – its team of barristers – that PET "will require a separate lawful basis to process PCD [personal confidential data]."

It adds that unless NHS England finds a solution, it will have to offer all patients the opportunity to opt out of sharing their data with the FDP under the current legislation for the control of patient information (Section 251 of the National Health Service Act 2006).

Given that the plan was started under the Tories, who have been trying to destroy Britain's socialized healthcare system for (checks notes) 76 years, in part by gradually privatizing its core functions.

The fact that it has been outsourced to one of the most privacy hostile business in the world is just icing on the cake.

Today in Health Data Insecurity

General practitioners in the UK are miffed because two software systems have been updated to allow 3rd parties to update patient records without the knowledge or approval of the patients or their doctors.

My guess is that this change is yet another attempt to bring the private sector into the operations of the NHS, but in any case, this appears to be insecure and dangerous for patients:

The UK's doctors' union has advised members running GP surgeries to turn off certain functionality in their IT system to prevent outside organizations adding to their workloads.

The row has broken out between the prestigious British Medical Association (BMA) and NHS England over data sharing capabilities in two common systems, TPP and EMIS.

In a YouTube video, Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the BMA's GP Committee, said GP Connect – a feature that allows data to be shared between general practices and other healthcare organizations – had introduced a new function called Update Record. At the moment, it is only being used to allow pharmacists to add data to GP records in a limited way.

However, concerns had been raised when the GP system providers had "tipped off" the BMA that doctors' ability to turn off the Update Record function was set to be removed.


"EMIS and TPP tipped us off that NHS England have asked for that 'off switch' to be removed," she said.

Because GPs are legally controllers of patient data under the UK's data protection law, they need to be able to prevent third parties updating records when necessary.

Even without the data protection law, it would seem to me that GPs would have a professional and moral obligation to prevent third parties from updating patient records without permission.

………

In a prepared statement, Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair and digital lead of BMA's England GP Committee, said: "We are recommending to GPs that they turn off the Update Record facility on GP Connect at the present time while we engage in discussions with NHS England to better understand the implications of this software.

"We are concerned about changes that allow others to add diagnoses, observations, and medications. These changes could have unintended consequences and add further pressure to the GP needing to ensure follow-up and ongoing care is provided to the patient due to other clinicians' decisions and actions. This will include more requests for follow-ups and support for patients for work initiated by others outside the practice team."

Given the predilection for the now former Tory government to ward privatizing NHS functions, and they tried to push while the elections were going on.

I cannot attribute this to anything but a desire for the Conservative appointed NHS executives to further put the privatization camel's nose further in the tent .

More of This

Minnesota has repealed its ban on community broadband.

This repealed a more-than-a-century old law that prevented municipalities from constructing "Telephone Exchanges". 

This has happened in a number states, and it's good policy.

It gets better and cheaper broadband (good policy) and it's good politics, because people hate the cable companies and the telcos who use their monopoly status to abuse their customers.

Some politicians are beginning to realize this.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

It looks like the Veterans Administration plan to provide an option for privatized services has resulted in massive cost overruns and delays even worse than the government run VA system.

Imagine that.

In 2014, Congress passed the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act, which set up a temporary program that outsourced veterans’ care from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to private sector providers. In 2018, President Donald Trump signed the VA MISSION Act, which made this outsourcing program permanent and greatly expanded it. Indeed, the legislation set up a parallel private sector network—the Veterans Community Care Program or VCCP—which pays private sector providers to treat more than a third of the nine million veterans enrolled in the VHA.

The Veterans Community Care Program promised to give veterans speedier access to high-quality care if they couldn’t get a timely appointment at the VHA or had to drive too long to get to one. Instead, as many studies have documented, VCCP care is of lower quality than that provided by the VHA. It also takes longer, on average, to get an appointment with a VCCP provider than it does with one at the VHA, and perhaps most importantly, the cost of this private sector program is soaring. Between 2014 and 2024, expenses for veterans’ care in the community quadrupled from $8 billion to $31 billion, accounting for a third of the budget for veterans’ medical services.

One reason for surging costs is that too many VCCP providers are unnecessarily utilizing high-cost tests and procedures and fraudulently billing for care that was never delivered.

Imagine that.  Adding a profit motive led to fraud and cost plus waste?

As a friend of mine is wont to say, "Chaos is job won!"

………

Furnishing veterans with more expensive services might theoretically be justified if it produced better outcomes. Three economists connected to the Bureau of Economic Research tested this hypothesis in a meticulously designed study of dually eligible veterans experiencing a medical emergency. An ambulance transported them to either a VA or private sector emergency department. The results of their respective care revealed that overtreatment was associated with poorer outcomes. Veterans who went to a non-VA facility received more services attached to higher reimbursement rates, for example, a cardiogram or inpatient admission. But rather than improving their lives, veterans brought to private sector EDs had a 46 percent greater chance of dying in the following month than if they’d gone to a VA facility.

(emphasis original)

Of course they were more likely to die.  Private sector profits are not free.  You have to sacrifice veteran's lives in order to support capitalism.

Killing the program is probably too toxic right now, but aggressively pursuing, and prosecuting, fraud, including the actions of executives who create a criminogenic environment, would be a good idea.

If the hedge fund owners of many of these medical practices were frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs, one would find the problems going away.

Well, This is Fucking Reassuring

What do you do when a crucial material for healthcare and technology is in short supply

What if the largest stockpile of this material is federally on an operated?

Why you privatize it, of course, so that a private entity, driven by private profit motives and the demands of Wall Street bankers,can it take control and manipulate the supply and price.

I am referring, of course, to the last of the national helium reserve, which is due to be auctioned off.

As an ironic side note, it should be noted that helium is the second most common substance in the universe.

Helium has a number of applications for which it is literally irreplaceable.

Most notably, it's use in super cooling objects such as superconducting magnets for things like MRI machines and in the manufacturer of microchips make it a crucial strategic material.

Of course, this didn't matter when President Bill Clinton got the Helium Privatization Act passed in 1996. 

Privatizing, and financializing, government assets and government functions was kind of his thing.

Well that, and putting Black and Brown people in jail in record numbers.

Well that, and repealing Glass-Steagall, leading to an orgy of largely unprosecuted fraud by the Wall Street banisters.

Well that, and sanctioning a decades long witch hunt against gays in the military with, "Don't ask, don't tell."

I'm beginning to don't like the Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch.

Posted via mobile.

Another Reason to Hate Bill Clinton

One of the biggest scams ever promulgated onto the American public was their reinventing government initiative.

The stated purpose was that by privatizing core government functions, we would get better services and save the taxpayers money.

The reality was that core government competencies were gutted, and it became a looting spree by contractors and consultants.

One of the biggest causes of transit cost bloat is the decimation of "state capacity" and the outsourcing of everything from design to procurement to engineering to manufacturing to consultants and other grifters.

BART bringing this in house is a huge win. https://t.co/XwDkUBC2sh

— (((Matthew Lewis))) progressive federalism SOS (@mateosfo) January 18, 2024

Of course, the reality was the goal.  It was the PMC generating profit opportunities for the PMC, and the rest of us could, and did, just get fucked.

Headline if the Day

Railroad Safety Standards Have Gotten So Bad the NTSB Is Beginning to Question the Whole Concept of Self-Regulation

—Fortune magazine

Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.

A little clarification to those of you not familiar with the role of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB): They have no direct role in drafting regulations, and they are forbidden by law from enforcing any regulations.

The NTSB is limited to investigating incidents, and recommending changes. 

The federal agency which is responsible for enforcing these regulations is the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and they have left the drafting of standards to the rail industry trade group the Association of American Railroads (AAR), with foreseeable, and disastrous, results:

Freight railcar inspections are happening less often and are not as thorough as in years past due to staff cuts, time constraints and regulatory loopholes, a union official testified Friday during a federal hearing to examine the reasons behind a fiery train derailment in Ohio.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report that an overheating wheel bearing likely caused the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment that sent a plume of toxic black smoke into the sky near East Palestine, Ohio. Several tank cars were damaged in the crash, and officials decided that five of them containing vinyl chloride needed to be blown open to release the chemical and prevent an explosion.

It’s not clear whether an inspector would have been able to catch that the bearing was failing because it is sealed within the railcar’s axle. No inspector was even given a chance.

Jason Cox with the Transportation Communications Union testified Friday during the second day of the NTSB hearing that the railcar that caused the derailment wasn’t inspected by Norfolk Southern even though it passed through three railyards where qualified inspectors were working.

Cox said the lack of inspections reflects changes Norfolk Southern has made since 2019 to slash the ranks of car inspectors and other employees, and that the company increasingly uses a loophole in federal regulations to rely on train crews to complete inspections instead of experts trained to do that work. He said train crews look at just 12 points on a rail car instead of the 90 to 105 points a carman checks.

………

Members of the NTSB questioned the wisdom of letting the railroad industry largely self-regulate — the Association of American Railroads trade group sets recommended standards — but [Senior Vice President, AAR Safety & Operations Michael] Rush said federal regulators have input on the group’s rules.

"Have input," yeah, right.

That means that industry lobbyists take senior FRA officials out to dinner before doing whatever the hell that they want.

Fruits of "Reinventing Government"

Since the Reagan administration in the 1980s there has been a move to outsource core governmental competencies to the private sector. 

This became more aggressive under then GWWB Secretary of Defense, when Dick Cheney massively expanded the use of mercenaries military contractors at the Pentagon, and further supercharged by the Bill Clinton and Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiative, which served to supercharge this process with the justification that the power of the private sector to save money.

It has left the government unable to manage the business of government, which has led to increased costs and protracted project schedules.

Nowhere is this more egregious than in transit projects, where the cost of project construction is 10 times that of France.

Of course, all this inefficiency leaves lots of money for campaign donations.

This is 3rd world nation bullsh%$:

In 2006, Alon Levy moved to New York to attend graduate school. Levy took the subway to get to class and events around the city, as most New Yorkers do. But unlike most New Yorkers, Levy is the type of person who will instantly become inquisitive about the most seemingly mundane issues. For example, when told there are people waiting at the elevator to get to an event, Levy starts crunching numbers in their head about elevator capacity.

So naturally, Levy took an interest in the subway— especially the new Second Avenue subway, when construction began in 2007. Levy heard this first phase of the project with three new stations and 3.5 miles of tunnel would cost $3.8 billion. (It actually ended up costing $4.5 billion in the end.) “OK, really high cost,” Levy recalled thinking to themself during a recent panel discussion at New York University on transit construction costs. “But this is how much it costs to build a subway, right?”

This idle thought led Levy to poke around and find out how much it actually costs to build a subway. They recalled finding that in Tokyo, around the same time, the government had implemented a moratorium on subway building because costs had risen too much, to approximately $500 million per kilometer. At the time, New York was building the Second Avenue subway for an estimated $2.5 billion per mile, or well over a billion dollars per kilometer. Paris was building subways for $250 million per kilometer, some 10 times less. The more Levy looked, the more they found New York wasn’t just paying more for subways than every other city, but many times more.

Most troublingly, Levy found, nobody seemed to know why this was the case—why New York specifically and the U.S. in general are so expensive to build in. “I keep asking New York rail fans why,” Levy recalled, using the term for subway enthusiasts who often have encyclopedic knowledge of the system, “and I never get satisfactory answers.”

Some 15 years after these initial inquiries, Levy now has an answer. It is a dastardly combination of:

• Hiring contractors to do the work in a manner so bizarre it almost seems intentionally designed to drive up costs
• Hiring consultants to design and manage projects rather than having the staff to do so in-house (or not having the necessary staff expertise to manage consultants in a way that keeps costs manageable)
• Haphazardly coordinating complicated work with local utilities
• Viewing infrastructure projects as job programs and therefore hiring more workers than needed (union and non-union, blue collar and white collar)
• Over-designing projects (stations in particular)
• And, on top of it all, having local politicians who micro-manage, slowing down planning at best; changing projects in a way that makes them more expensive and less useful at worst
  

Levy has these answers because after writing about the problem for the better part of a decade on their blog Pedestrian Observations, Levy has, alongside a team of researchers at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management—including Elif Ensari and Marco Chitti—spent the past three years crunching massive amounts of data, interviewing hundreds of experts all over the world, and conducting in-depth case studies on transit projects in Sweden, Istanbul, Italy, Boston, and New York. The group plans to release its final report this month on what the U.S. and New York in particular can do to start building transit at least on par with the rest of the world. It is part of a growing body of literature—the Eno Center for Transportation launched a similar project around the same time—examining the question of how the U.S. can be more productive with its transportation infrastructure dollars.

………

It’s important to emphasize why this matters. All too often, politicians say they want an efficient, effective government but do the opposite. Two transportation-related examples come to mind. One is Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s failed experiment with the Purple Line, a light rail that will connect Bethesda and New Carrollton in the D.C. suburbs, built under a public-private partnership model ostensibly to save money; it has been such a disaster that the first contractor abandoned the project midway through construction and it is now set to cost $3.4 billion, or 75 percent more than budgeted. The other is in New York, where in 2019 then-governor Andrew Cuomo launched a “transformation plan” created by a consulting firm to “simplify a complex and inefficient organization,” the MTA (still) says on its website. The most noteworthy “accomplishment” was hiring six-figure executives who promptly left with golden parachutes; once Cuomo was gone the transformation team was shut down. There are countless more examples where that came from.

We have been systematically destroying our government's capabilities for over 40 years, because of the promises made by the free market mousketeers that they can save money, deliver sooner, and keep our daughter from dating that guy with the tattoos and piercings.

Rather unsurprisingly, it does not work.  Ever.

It is a corrupt philosophy, which creates corrupt public services which never work.

Doing Something Right

Perhaps the most corrupt part of our economy, and definitely the most corrupt part of the education industrial complex are charter schools.

They are more expensive, do not produce better results, are more segregated, and they are rife with fraud and self dealing.

The last two bits, segregation and corruption are why they are so popular.  The people who never got over Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, like the first one, and the banksters and other bunco artists love the second part, because creating criminogenic situations is how they make money.

The fact that this band of moral reprobates are upset that the Biden administration is proposing more oversight and accountability is a pretty good indication that the White House is doing the right thing:

New rules proposed by the Education Department to govern a federal grant program for charter schools are drawing bipartisan backlash and angering parents, who say the Biden administration is seeking to stymie schools that have fallen out of favor with many Democrats but maintain strong support among Black and Latino families.

The proposal would add requirements to the application process for grants from the federal Charter Schools Program, which has doled out billions of dollars over nearly 30 years to help open new charter schools or expand existing ones. It sets tighter restrictions on the schools’ relationships with for-profit entities and encourages more collaboration between charters and the districts they operate in.

The most controversial part of the plan would require grant applicants to prove demand and community support for their schools, examine the effect they would have on neighboring district-run schools, and demonstrate that they would not exacerbate segregation.

Proponents of the plan say it is aimed at increasing accountability for the schools, which promised to be engines of innovation and competition that improve district-run schools. But critics say the rules are onerous and out of touch with the reality of how many charter schools operate: autonomously, and as alternatives to traditional public schools.

Leaders across the charter school community have said the new requirements would quell the growth of such schools, which serve 3.6 million students — 69 percent of them students of color and two-thirds from low-income households — and have waiting lists of millions more.

Emphasis mine.  The reason that charter schools disproportionately serve poor and minorities is because one of the unspoken goals is to create a segregated school system. 

Individual schools are even more segregated, with schools tending to be nearly 100% minority or lily white.

The regulations with regard to for relations with for-profit groups are long overdue.  Between over-payment for curricula and educational materials, and excessive rents paid, billions of dollars are being looted from schools, frequently to the school founders, who own those same for-profit businesses.

………

As a candidate, Mr. Biden declared that he was not “a charter school fan,” which shocked many given that the schools had proliferated under the charter-friendly Obama administration. On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden vowed to cut off for-profit charters — less than 12 percent of the nation’s 7,700 charter schools — from federal funding.

Between Barack Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan, it's amazing that there were any public schools at all left in America.  They were more aggressive in privatizing education than the BW Bush administration.

Also, as I have noted, charter schools do not perform any better than the public alternatives.

The experiment has failed worse than the "New Math" did in the 1960s and 1970s. (Full disclosure: New Math worked for me)

………

The pledge reflected a longstanding goal of congressional Democrats — led by Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee — who in recent years have seized on loopholes that allowed for-profit management companies to tap federal funding, including from the Charter Schools Program, by contracting with nonprofits to essentially run their day-to-day operations.

The efforts came after a series of scandals in the sector, including a self-dealing scheme and other fraud, and research showing that students in for-profit charter schools performed worse academically than their peers in nonprofit charters.

This is literally a crackdown on fraud, and the response of the charter school industry is lobbying, basically rent seeking, which is an indication of their ineffectiveness and corruption.

The proposed rules deliver on Mr. Biden’s promise, requiring that charters receiving federal grants not enter into a contract with a for-profit entity to manage “substantial administrative control” of their operations. That provision has met little opposition, even among charter supporters.

Carol Corbett Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education and an ardent critic of charters, said the rules merely addressed the need for more accountability and transparency that should be required for any taxpayer-funded programs. The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, has chronicled for-profit tactics, charter school scandals and how the federal grant program disbursed millions to schools that never opened or closed.

Ms. Burris’s organization joined dozens of others — including the National Education Association, which is the nation’s largest teachers union, and the Southern Poverty Law Center — in praising the department for “thoughtful and well-reasoned regulations.”

If you want to look at what the charter school supporters are up to:

………

For example, separate provisions that would prioritize applicants that partner with school systems and require applicants to secure a facility before receiving all their funding do not acknowledge the tensions that often exist between charters and district-run schools, said Amanda Johnson, the executive director of Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School in Clarksdale, Miss.

And now, quoting Paul Harvey, "The Rest of the Story."

Amanda Johnson was vociferously opposed to a Mississippi state requirement that board members who received state funding comply with state ethics rules. 

Complying with ethics rules is not that tough, it means that board members cannot steer funds to their companies or their employers companies, and that they need to disclose such conflicts.

Complying with those regulations should be, at most, a minor annoyance for anyone who wants to honestly run a charter school.

This is a Troubling Trend

Over the past 50+ years, corporate research laboratories have vanished in the United States.

This is not a surprise.  With the emasculation of  antitrust enforcement, it's easier to buy an innovative startup, think Facebook buying Instagram, than it is to develop new and improved products:

………

Arora et al argue that a cause of the decline in productivity is that:

The past three decades have been marked by a growing division of labor between universities focusing on research and large corporations focusing on development. Knowledge produced by universities is not often in a form that can be readily digested and turned into new goods and services. Small firms and university technology transfer offices cannot fully substitute for corporate research, which had integrated multiple disciplines at the scale required to solve significant technical problems. As someone with many friends who worked at the legendary corporate research labs of the past, including Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and who myself worked at Sun Microsystems' research lab, this is personal. Below the fold I add my 2c-worth to Arora et al's extraordinarily interesting article.

The authors provide a must-read, detailed history of the rise and fall of corporate research labs. I lived through their golden age; a year before I was born the transistor was invented at Bell Labs:

The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.[2] The most widely used transistor is the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, which was invented by Egyptian engineer Mohamed Atalla with Korean engineer Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[3][4][5] The MOSFET was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses.[6]

Before I was 50 Bell Labs had been euthanized as part of the general massacre of labs:

Bell Labs had been separated from its parent company AT&T and placed under Lucent in 1996; Xerox PARC had also been spun off into a separate company in 2002. Others had been downsized: IBM under Louis Gerstner re-directed research toward more commercial applications in the mid-90s ... A more recent example is DuPont’s closing of its Central Research & Development Lab in 2016. Established in 1903, DuPont research rivaled that of top academic chemistry departments. In the 1960s, DuPont’s central R&D unit published more articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society than MIT and Caltech combined. However, in the 1990s, DuPont’s attitude toward research changed and after a gradual decline in scientific publications, the company’s management closed its Central Research and Development Lab in 2016. Arora et al point out that the rise and fall of the labs coincided with the rise and fall of anti-trust enforcement:

Historically, many large labs were set up partly because antitrust pressures constrained large firms’ ability to grow through mergers and acquisitions. In the 1930s, if a leading firm wanted to grow, it needed to develop new markets. With growth through mergers and acquisitions constrained by anti-trust pressures, and with little on offer from universities and independent inventors, it often had no choice but to invest in internal R&D. The more relaxed antitrust environment in the 1980s, however, changed this status quo. Growth through acquisitions became a more viable alternative to internal research, and hence the need to invest in internal research was reduced.

Lack of anti-trust enforcement, pervasive short-termism, driven by Wall Street's focus on quarterly results, and management's focus on manipulating the stock price to maximize the value of their options killed the labs:

Large corporate labs, however, are unlikely to regain the importance they once enjoyed. Research in corporations is difficult to manage profitably. Research projects have long horizons and few intermediate milestones that are meaningful to non-experts. As a result, research inside companies can only survive if insulated from the short-term performance requirements of business divisions. However, insulating research from business also has perils. Managers, haunted by the spectre of Xerox PARC and DuPont’s “Purity Hall”, fear creating research organizations disconnected from the main business of the company. Walking this tightrope has been extremely difficult. Greater product market competition, shorter technology life cycles, and more demanding investors have added to this challenge. Companies have increasingly concluded that they can do better by sourcing knowledge from outside, rather than betting on making game-changing discoveries in-house.

I think that the analysis is good, but limited.  It ignores the devastating impact of the Bayh-Dole Act, which served to mandate privatization of publicly funded research.

That research is now subsidized twice, first when federal money funds the research, and then when the federal contractors are allowed to get an exclusive license (a patent).

From a profit perspective, it makes sense for business to avail themselves of these subsidies rather than developing or maintaining an internal organic R&D capability.

From the prospect of the rest of society, this makes no sense as all.

If The Economist Is Against It, I Am for It

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, (AMLO) as he promised when he ran for President is moving to renationalize much of Mexico's energy industry, and the august folks at The Economist are completely losing their sh%$ over this, because stealing from the people to privatize state resources at below market rates is fine, but attempting to return those stolen assets is an affront to the will of God.

Their argument is for this is that large industrial concerns have been able to pay far less for electricity from the private suppliers, though (of course) these sweetheart rates are not available to ordinary people.

I'm sure that privatized electricity works in Mexico, just as it worked in California in 2000-2001 and just as it worked in Texas last winter.

There position is quite simple: Private entities must be allowed to profit from the public commons at the expense of the public good, and if (when) they fail then they must be bailed out by the taxpayers.

Socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us.

In the words of Emilio Estavez in the immortal movie Repo Man, "F%$# that!"

Tories Walk Back NHS Privatization

And in the process, throw some serious shade at their former coalition members, the Liberal-Democrats.

We now have a report that 10 Downings Street is looking at rolling back changes made to the National Health Service in 2012 that promulgated privatization of the system.

This is not a surprise.  Increasing the role of the private sector in healthcare never produces better results.

What is interesting though is that the plan, which has been leaked, seems to have been couched in language pointing the finger at the Lib-Dems, probably because the Tories see them as more of a threat than Labour: (See other prominent mentions of the Lib-Dems here and here as well)

The Conservative Government is planning a major overhaul of the NHS by reversing some of the controversial privatisation plans introduced by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, according to a leaked white paper.

The draft document suggested that Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to reduce the role of the private sector in the NHS by reducing competition and competitive tendering and replacing it with collaboration between health providers.

………

The changes would effectively rollback some of the 2012 reforms of David Cameron's Government with his Health Secretary Andrew Lansley that saw the establishment of NHS England to run the health service as well as the creation of GP-led clinical commissioning groups to organise local services.

The leaked proposals, published by Health Policy Insight, acknowledged the "unprecedented test to health and care services" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the "urgent" need for a "broader approach to health and care".

………

It set out how England's Health Secretary would assume "enhanced powers of direction" over a newly merged NHS England and NHS Improvement, to set direction in a more "agile" way.

Privatization has always been the worst possible approach to potential problems with a public health system, and it has always been unpopular.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made further movement in this direction untenable, and so the Tories are reversing course, and trying to leave their former coalition members holding the bag.

Tweet of the Day

Space exploration is being used by billionaires as a narrative management tool to sell the myth of unlimited expansionism. These guys know ecosystemic collapse is coming at us far faster than their little space dildos can happen but they need the idea of it to keep us at bay.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 7, 2020

This is a cynical view of the the oligarchs' space activities, but there is precedent.

One need only look at all the libraries named after the 19^th robber-barons.

Unleashing the Power of the Private Sector

It turns out that putting Medicaid under private management in Iowa has tripled the price increases compared to previous years.

The private sector is to the efficient administration of healthcare what Ebola is to French kissing:

The average cost of insuring an Iowan on Medicaid has climbed nearly three times as fast since the state hired private companies to manage the program, when compared to the previous six years, new state figures show.

Since fiscal 2017, the first full year of privatization, the per-member cost of Iowa's Medicaid program has risen an average of 4.4 percent per year, according to the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency. In the previous six years, the per-member cost rose an average of 1.5 percent per year, the agency said.

The new cost figures come amid continuing controversy over whether Iowa should have hired private companies to run the $5 billion program. The shift’s supporters said it would slow growth in health care spending on the more than 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans covered by Medicaid.

The Legislative Services Agency compiled the new cost increase figures from past budget reports published by the Department of Human Services, which oversees Medicaid.

………

The Medicaid cost increases for this fiscal year are partly driven by an 8.4 percent raise the Iowa Department of Human Services agreed last month to give the two managed-care companies running the program. That raise, which includes state and federal tax dollars, will send $344 million more to Amerigroup and United Healthcare this fiscal year, which runs through June 2019.

So, spending millions of dollars on private management don't end up saving money.

Hoocoodanode?

A Feature, Not a Bug

A new report reports that charter schools are an orgy of self-delaing and corruption.

This is not a surprise. Whenever private forces take over a public asset, looting is the inevitable result:

Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report showing that the federal government has lost a billion dollars to charter school waste and fraud. But the organization had not stopped sifting through the data. Their follow-up report, “Still Asleep At The Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in as Pileup of Fraud ands Waste,” reveals that the situation is even worse than shown in the first report, while laying out more state by state details. Particularly striking—the vast amount of money that has been wasted on ghost schools that never served.

NPE is a group co-founded by Diane Ravitch, the Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become an outspoken critic of education reform. The organization's executive director is Carol Burris, a former award-winning New York principal. Burris was the primary author of this report.

The reports examine what happened to money disbursed by the Federal Charter Fund, a charter grant source created in 1994 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Since 1995, it has handed out almost $4 billion.

Some new findings in this follow-up report:

The original report underestimated the number of charters that had taken federal grant funds and then either closed or never opened at all. That report found 1,000 such charters; the number now appears to be closer to 1,800. That means the failure rate is close to 37% nationally. Michigan gave grants of at least $100,000 to 72 schools that never opened at all; California gave grants to 61 unopened schools. Those two states alone account for over $16 million dollars spent without educating a single child. A grand total of 537 schools never actually opened; tax dollars spent on literally nothing.

The charter school system is constructed for two purposes:  Breaking teachers' unions, and allowing finance types to loot taxpayer money.

Both the Wisest and the Snarkiest Thing that I have Heard this Year

In an analysis of potential murder charges against PG&E for the California fires, Yves Smith related the following from an email exchange:

Arbeit Macht Frei Slave-Labor Was the Original Public-Private Partnership.

This is brilliant.  It may be the most brilliant and snarkiest thing that I've heard for last year as well.

Unleashing the Power of the Private Sector

The price inflation in medicaid has tripled after Iowa privatized the program.

Obviously, it's a limited sample, but when one considers that this has almost always been the case with the private sector running healthcare, it should come as not surprise:

The average cost of insuring an Iowan on Medicaid has climbed nearly three times as fast since the state hired private companies to manage the program, when compared to the previous six years, new state figures show.

Since fiscal 2017, the first full year of privatization, the per-member cost of Iowa's Medicaid program has risen an average of 4.4 percent per year, according to the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency. In the previous six years, the per-member cost rose an average of 1.5  percent per year, the agency said.

The new cost figures come amid continuing controversy over whether Iowa should have hired private companies to run the $5 billion program. The shift’s supporters said it would slow growth in health care spending on the more than 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans covered by Medicaid.

It was never about making Medicaid working better, it was about making it worse, as well as being about shoveling money to politically connected contractors.

This is a feature, not a bug.

The Goal of Privatization is Not Efficiency, It's Larceny

Case in point, Iowa, where a timid Obama administration allowed the Republicans there to privatize medicaid, and the rate of cost increases have tripled:

The average cost of insuring an Iowan on Medicaid has climbed nearly three times as fast since the state hired private companies to manage the program, when compared to the previous six years, new state figures show.

Since fiscal 2017, the first full year of privatization, the per-member cost of Iowa's Medicaid program has risen an average of 4.4 percent per year, according to the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency. In the previous six years, the per-member cost rose an average of 1.5 percent per year, the agency said.

The new cost figures come amid continuing controversy over whether Iowa should have hired private companies to run the $5 billion program. The shift’s supporters said it would slow growth in health care spending on the more than 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans covered by Medicaid.

………

The Medicaid cost increases for this fiscal year are partly driven by an 8.4 percent raise the Iowa Department of Human Services agreed last month to give the two managed-care companies running the program. That raise, which includes state and federal tax dollars, will send $344 million more to Amerigroup and United Healthcare this fiscal year, which runs through June 2019.

Anyone want to guess how much of those increases get recycled through to campaign donations?

More of This

Baltimore City is send a city charter change to voters for prohibit privatizing its water and sewer:

Baltimore City Council members concerned about lobbying efforts to privatize the city’s water supply unanimously approved legislation Monday that, if approved by voters, would make Baltimore the first major city to ban the sale or lease of the water system.

City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young waived council rules to allow for fast-tracked approval of a charter amendment that will go to voters on the November ballot.

“Access to clean and affordable water should be looked at as a basic human right,” Young said.
Baltimore council considering charter amendment to ban sale of city water system

The move could make Baltimore the first city in the country to amend its charter to preserve public ownership and control over its water and sewer systems, and the largest U.S. city to prohibit sale or lease of its water system. Northampton, Mass., passed legislation in 2016 prohibiting the sale or lease of its water system.

Incorporating this into the city charter doesn't make it more difficult to sell off the water system, it means that there has to be a public vote, and weeks, if not months, of public discussions, which the privatizers would probably lose.

Given the record of privatizing public services, this is a very good thing.

Stopped Clock, NASA Edition

Donald Trump is proposing privatizing the international space station:

The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry.

The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.

I actually agree with move.

In scientific terms, the ISS is complete pants.  It has consumed massive resources for next to no scientific value.

Of course, there really isn't a commercial justification for this either:  Anything that you want to set up tto take advantage of micro-gravity would be cheaper to do without people.

It's basically a white elephant.