Sore loser in the bidding war

[scaredyclassic]

“Don’t jaywalk at the intersection of how things are and how things should be”.

I’m not sure what that means but it sounds cool.

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=CA renter]
Perhaps you didn’t know this, but the #1 place where fraud, waste, and abuse occurs in government spending is where private entities and public money intersect. Private contractors and those involved in public-private partnerships are the main players involved in the abuse of taxpayer money, not unions.[/quote]

That’s true, but still…. Some services can be privatized quite well.

The French privatized their water company a long time ago.
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GSZ:FP

The Spanish have a private highway company that operates worldwide. The German privatized their post office.

I believe that most countries privatized their airports. They have new gleaming airports, not some of the third world facilities we still use. Their subways use sophisticated electronic cards that operate on buses and parking garages.

Unions are not the main problem, but part of problem. A lot of stuff we could do, but can’t because of unions that resist efficiency.

If it works better, do it. If more socialistic countries can do it, why can’t we?

On an individual level, yes, you do want to defend your own meal ticket… but as an academic discussion, you have to recognize the truth.

[joec]

Maybe part of the problem is not so much public/private, but our political system is too screwed up to really do much of anything.

Look at the cable industry or Internet service which the the US invented (Internet), but we now have one of the slowest services in the world at a higher cost due to monopolies and the industry carving it out this way/that way.

Look at schools, health care in a lot of the other countries and the US is lacking and far behind…

Public employees aren’t of a higher standard, just more politically connected, lawyer-ed and special interests (unions) to improve upon or fix.

[spdrun]

That’s true, but still…. Some services can be privatized quite well.

The French privatized their water company a long time ago.
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GSZ:FP

SOME services. However, some services work better as public entities. Which is better-maintained? The French SNCF network, Deutsche Bahn, or the private freight railroad network of the US which Amtrak has to beg to run trains on?

I’ve had much better customer service from semi-public (though publicly held share is decreasing) European airlines than 100% private US airlines.

Municipal broadband can be GREAT as compared to crummy private offerings in the US. There is a place for public services. Perhaps the public services in the US are just in the WRONG places.

[FlyerInHi]

spd, with airlines, people bitch about service but in reality they would rather pay less and live with the lesser service.
http://t.money.msn.com/top-stocks/most-hated-us-airline-is-also-the-most-profitable

Compared to the US, foreign carriers have less union restrictions on staffing. They can put more energetic, motivated, and service friendly staff on their routes. Here, the more senior people get to fly the best overseas routes. One example, US staff don’t clean the bathrooms even on long flights. Fly the foreign carriers and the bathrooms are cleaned every few hours and the food service more frequent.

[spdrun]

^^^

That’s also true for a segment abroad — see also: Ryanair and friends. I’m comparing established US and European carriers, not Ryanair to (mean)Spirit(ed) Airways.

[svelte]

[quote=AN][quote=svelte][quote=AN]
Neither. Most criminals don’t work.[/quote]

You know what the eff she meant.

Do most employed persons who commit crimes work in the public or private sector.

If you want to get technical, I would submit that virtually every person alive has broken the law at some point. Making us all criminals. And most of us work.

[img_assist|nid=17992|title=What Day Is It|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=500|height=500][/quote]
wow, someone got their panties in a bunch.[/quote]

heh! I don’t wear underwear! 🙂

Let’s review.

You tell CA that the multiple choice answers she supplied do not include the right answer.

I point out (a) you purposely misconstrued the question to make her look bad and (b) she did supply the right answer.

You double-down on online misbehavior by insinuating that my silkies are bent out of shape.

Obfuscate and deflect. You getting ready to run for office?

[an]

Retarded question deserve retarded answer.

Btw, stop taking things on the internet so seriously. Me saying ba-zinga is enough for you to understand what my point is. If you don’t, you might want to google to see who say ba-zinga.

[CA renter]

[quote=joec][quote=CA renter]I want to make it clear that I am not trying to attack private sector workers as much as I am defending public sector workers from these relentless and incredibly unfair attacks.

Just go through all of the threads on this site to see who’s doing the attacking. Almost all of the threads where I have to post about this topic started out as an attack against public sector workers and/or unions.

If people don’t want to hear the truth, then stop posting lies and BS corporatist propaganda. If people want to push for the abolition of teacher tenure or public unions, then show **evidence** that any of these things will actually benefit students, taxpayers, workers, citizens, etc. as a whole. Simply repeating the right-wing propaganda is NOT going to cut it.[/quote]

As a defender of ACA / Obamacare, if you read my posts above AGAIN, I’m actually not attacking having public employee jobs or stating we should outsource everything. You just wasted 2 long posts above trying to say that I am saying to outsource everything when that’s very far from the truth.

Some jobs simply can’t be private since it makes no financial sense to provide some services when the profits/bottom line is what’s important for most private corporations. I very well understand that such as things for fire departments, defense, police, etc…should not be private for this very reason.

Again, I state again and take issue with YOUR STANCE AND HOW YOU COME AS SAYING THAT PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE A HIGHER STANDARD THAN PRIVATE AND THIS WHOLE NOTION THAT PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE BETTER…

Even though that might NOT be your intent, it certainly comes off that way with what you posts and if you re-read your first comment, it’s what you write as well.

It just sounds as if you’re a know it all type person.

The whole wall of text you posted on privatizing certain industries and those not doing well isn’t even something I’m advocating or want to advocate so you might as well just delete those as a rebuttal since I’m not talking about those things.[/quote]

Joe, the privatization posts were in response to this nugget:

[quote=joec]

At the end of the day, ANYTHING the public government runs is more expensive, less efficient, more prone to fraud, rip/off people, than near anything the private industry does so please stop with the BS as well that the standards or public sector jobs is higher, just DIFFERENT.[/quote]

It’s simply not true. Even the right-wing groups can’t come up with anything to show that privatization saves money.

Maybe I come across as a know-it-all because of my frustration with the never-ending and totally unsubstantiated claims that unions/public sector workers are bad, or that they cost taxpayers more money than if public services were outsourced/privatized. At least I research the topics and have some real-life familiarity with them before I debate. Too many people do no research at all, but insist on spewing their right-wing propaganda all over the internet. Even when the facts are presented to them, they continue with the same old lies and misinformation on another thread at some later time. It gets old.

[scaredyclassic]

It seems like privatization would save money.

But as someone on the Internet once said, don’t jaywalk at the intersection of how things are and how things should be.

[no_such_reality]

California’s Medical Prison beset by waste and mismanagement

Some people are simply in denial.

[CA renter]

[quote=no_such_reality]California’s Medical Prison beset by waste and mismanagement

Some people are simply in denial.[/quote]

Actually, a whole lot of people are in denial.

There are problems at the medical prison in that article, and the prison system in California is a mess, in general. I don’t have a medial background, much less a background in healthcare for prison inmates, but this commenter seems to have the best grasp of what might be wrong at this prison hospital, IMO.

…….

naughtyrn
Rank 13441

I am a RN in a Ca state correctional facility. I have many years experience in the hospital ER and ICU. The problem is the reciever! He is unrealistic in his goals and you can’t always throw money at a problem to make it better. I only work with a handfull of RN’s and LVN’s that have the patient care knowledge to work in corrections. Most of the nursing staff if “institutionalized” they are lazy and uneducated.
The reciever thinks that we need More and More Managers instead of qualified workers. We Have a Correctional Nurse Executive that makes $15,000.00 a month a Director of Nurses who makes $13,000.00 a month and 13 Supervising Registered Nurses that make $10,000.00 a month. We have 1 supervisor per 3-5 nurses. In the Hospital 1 Supervisor manages 2 Units of maybe 75 employees. They are all Reactionary- they aren’t proactive on problems they just react when problems arise. Our CNE who is so far removed from patient care dictates the set up of operations where i work she doesn’t want any input from the nurses who actually have to work in the area. Working in a correctional environment is very unique but in our facility correctional staff and medical staff rarely talk to each other until there is a problem.
If the people of California want to make this new medical facility work they should fire the reciever and the wasteful upper management and ask the people that have to work their how to fix it!!!.

[CA renter]

That being said, there is no indication that privatization would fix anything. Prisons have been privatized over the past few decades, and the results have been poor on a number of levels, including cost.

Here’s an article about just a few of the many stories where the privatization of prisons has resulted in more problems that it was supposed to fix.

———–

On Wednesday, news broke that Idaho is dumping the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and searching for a new company to run the state’s biggest prison. The prison is so violent that prisoners call it the “Gladiator School,” and it has been the subject of both an ACLU lawsuit and an Idaho State Police investigation. And earlier this year, CCA admitted that its employees had falsified nearly 4,800 hours of staffing records at the prison over a seven-month period, billing the state for security posts that they actually left unfilled.

Idaho’s decision to end the Gladiator School contract with CCA will make it the fourth termination of a CCA prison contract that the company has announced this month.

The week before the Gladiator School announcement, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced that it would be closing down two CCA prisons for budgetary reasons. (One of the two prisons, the Dawson State Jail, was the site of multiple high-profile prisoner deaths, including a baby girl who was allegedly born into a prison toilet after staff ignored her mother’s requests for medical assistance.)

The same week, CCA announced that the Mississippi Department of Corrections decided not to renew CCA’s contract to run the state’s Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. Earlier this year, a prisoner was stabbed to death during a prison riot at Wilkinson – which was the second riot in twelve months at Wilkinson and the third uprising at a CCA prison in Mississippi during the same time period.

The grisly records of these CCA prisons exemplify why handing control of prisons over to for-profit companies is a recipe for abuse, neglect, and misconduct. A study conducted by the Idaho Department of Corrections in 2008 found that there were four times more prisoner-on-prisoner assaults at ICC than at Idaho’s other seven prisons combined. As detailed in the ACLU’s 2011 report, Banking on Bondage, several studies suggest that prisoners in for-profit prisons face greater threats to their safety than those in publicly-run prisons – a possible reflection of the higher staff turnover in private prisons, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers. Additionally, numerous religious groups – including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Methodist Church – have condemned the perverse incentives involved in for-profit incarceration, often emphasizing the inherent conflict between the goal of rehabilitation and the company’s profit motive.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/corrections-corporation-america-loses-four-prison-contracts-month

[CA renter]

And private hospitals often run into their own problems when starting out (opening up a prison hospital is even more expensive and wrought with potential problems because of its patient population and all of the additional resources required for that).

Opening North County’s newest and largest hospital has put Palomar Health in the red, according to the public health care district’s latest financial report.

Robert Hemker, Palomar’s chief financial officer, said the organization has known for a long time that opening the $956 million edifice on Citracado Parkway in west Escondido would mean spending from the district’s reserves, but he said expected growth in revenue has not come as quickly as expected.

Palomar’s top money manager said he hasn’t started sweating yet but added that the hospital system’s fiscal third quarter, which runs from January through March, is critical in terms of finding budget equilibrium.

“We’re closely monitoring the situation. I’m not going to use the word ‘concerned,’” Hemker said.

Palomar’s latest finance report, which covers July through October, showed that the three-hospital system had a $6 million loss for the first four months of the fiscal year, rather than the $9 million profit that had been budgeted. That created a $15.4 million budget gap once depreciation expense was removed.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Dec/11/new-hospital-in-the-red/

[SD Realtor]

Interesting. I did an experiment. I only looked at the very first post of this thread, and then the very last post.

[Author]

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