The Liberal Avenger
“You’re in good hands, soldier! I put some of my buddies from Halliburton in charge operations at this facility.”
“Say what?”
When the Washington Post exposed the disgraceful conditions endured by maimed veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (Washington Post coverage) (Military Times coverage), most conservative commentators ignored the story. A few went so far as to say that the soldiers were just a bunch of whiners. And some tried to use the story as a club to beat up on liberals who favor universal access to health care:
John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and many other liberals sing the praises of universal health care. They insist that it is the best way to make sure everyone has the best care possible. However, if the US government is so bogged down financially and politically that it’s incapable of providing the best health care possible for our veterans and injured military men and women returning from war who have sacrificed so much to protect us, then how the hell is that same US government going to provide the best health care for the rest of the 300 million people in this country? Universal health care will be a gargantuan version of the VA and military health care systems.
First of all, the bit about a gargantuan version of the VA is just another wingnut straw man. Neither Edwards, nor Clinton, nor Kerry has proposed anything of the sort. The major universal health care proposals under consideration mirror either Canada’s single-payer system, or an expanded version of the popular Medicare program.
Also, let’s be clear about what’s to blame for the current debacle. It wasn’t overzealous regulation that led to soldier’s rooms being filled with mold and infested with mice and cockroaches. It was lack of oversight that led to those conditions. And it wasn’t government bureaucracy that led to the deterioration of the hospital staff. It was privatization.
The Pentagon gave the contract to handle operations at Walter Reed to a company called IAP Worldwide Services, and conditions at Walter Reed immediately began to go downhill. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently found that the decision to privatize Walter Reed led to an exodus of skilled personnel from the facility, and that IAP failed to replace these professionals:
The decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed. Prior to the award of the contract, there were over 300 federal employees providing facilities management and related services at Walter Reed. By February 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management, the number of support personnel had dropped to under 60. Yet instead of hiring additional personnel, IAP apparently replaced the remaining 60 federal employees with only 50 IAP personnel.
The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful. Part of our mission on the Oversight Committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers…
But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bushs competitive sourcing initiative, which was launched in 2002. According to OMB, the goal of President Bush’s competitive sourcing initiative was to allow the private sector to compete for nearly half of all federal jobs.
OK, make sure you’re sitting down, because this last bit of information is going to shock you: the president and CEO of IAP Worldwide Services are both former executives of KBR, which was a subsidiary of Halliburton.
No! Not Halliburton! Not Dick Cheney’s former company! Not the company whose rising fortunes have made Cheney millions of dollars since he became vice president! Not the company that seems to be at the center of every sleazy privatization or no-bid contract scandal over the past 6 years! Not the company that has turned the deaths of 3,000 American soldiers into billions of dollars!
You may recall that KBR was the company that was in charge of providing our troops in Iraq with clean water, but provided the troops with water that was laced with raw sewage instead. So when the Pentagon privatized operations at Walter Reed, they naturally turned to a company that’s run by former executives from KBR.
So much for the efficiency of private enterprise.
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A chronology of the Walter Reed privatization is available at unbossed.com.
(via Daily Kos)
(cross posted at appletree)
