The New York Times revealed what happened when a hospital decided to turn its emergency room services over to a private contractor.
“Early last year, executives at a small hospital an hour north of Spokane, Wash., started using a company called EmCare to staff and run their emergency room. The hospital had been struggling to find doctors to work in its E.R., and turning to EmCare was something hundreds of other hospitals across the country had done.
That’s when the trouble began.
“Before EmCare, about 6 percent of patient visits in the hospital’s emergency room were billed for the most complex, expensive level of care. After EmCare arrived, nearly 28 percent got the highest-level billing code.
“A small, rural hospital in Washington State, Newport Hospital and Health Services, outsourced its emergency room, as many hospitals have. Soon it started hearing from patients confused by getting large bills from the E.R. doctors.
“On top of that, the hospital, Newport Hospital and Health Services, was getting calls from confused patients who had received surprisingly large bills from the emergency room doctors. Although the hospital had negotiated rates for its fees with many major health insurers, the EmCare physicians were not part of those networks and were sending high bills directly to the patients. For a patient needing care with the highest-level billing code, the hospital’s previous physicians had been charging $467; EmCare’s charged $1,649.
“The billing scenario, that was the real fiasco and caught us off guard,” said Tom Wilbur, the chief executive of Newport Hospital. “Hindsight being 20/20, we never would have done that.”
“Faced with angry patients, the hospital took back control of its coding and billing.”
Sound familiar? That’s privatization.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is Richard Whitmire, full time charter cheerleader:
“The nation’s oldest civil-rights organization and the largest teachers union worry about charters for similar reasons. Independently run charters generally don’t employ unionized teachers, and they pull students from traditional district schools to which the NAACP is deeply committed. In short, charters disrupt the status quo—for adults.”
Do you see what they do here? There is no possible criticism of charter schools that is valid.
ALL charter criticism is due to charters “disrupting the status quo for adults”
It’s a neat trick and completely immunizes them from any criticism or opposition.
This isn’t a “debate” and they aren’t “agnostics”. Public schools can be criticized endlessly, relentlessly, and they are every day in ed reform, but charter schools cannot. If there IS criticism it is immediately dismissed as invalid- bad faith on the part of the critics.
The NAACP can’t even say that charter schools should be non-profit or regulated. That’s a criticism and therefore forbidden. They accept only full-time cheerleaders into the club. Dissenters need not apply.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-grads-get-a-leg-up-in-college-1501106538
Too bad that story is behind a paywall.
Off-Topic:
Tim Cook and Other Leaders Contacted by Trump Administration for STEM Education Advice
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/27/tim-cook-trump-stem-advice/
Because the people who actually work in schools don’t have any ideas….
[Sarcasm]
I love how STEM has been narrowed by ed reform into “coding”.
They took “science technology engineering and math” and turned that whole giant field of study into “coding camps”.
Manage to drive any possible joy right out of it.
Tim Cook will now tell us what STEM means. I bet STEM looks a lot like what the tech industry needs right now!
When did “science” become “computer sciences” anyway? Are they allowed to study biology or chemistry?
Good point.
“Computer science” is actually a misnomer.
The vast majority of it is not real science.
Much of it is actually engineering.
And coding is not even engineering the way most schools teach it. Of course they call it “software engineering” to sound impressive, but it doesn’t follow most of the fairly rigorous practices of real engineering disciplines. Unlike real engineers, software engineers don’t even have to be credentialed. And these are the people who program your airplanes, medical devices and self driving cars!
PS
I actually worked as a so called “software engineer” (I considered myself a programmer)
Of all the people I worked with, the best programmers were actually not CS graduates but people with degrees in real sciences and real engineering. CSgrads are good at coding but nowhere near as good at problem solving as real scientists and engineers.
Chiara wrote: “When did “science” become “computer sciences”anyway? Are they allowed to study biology or chemistry?”
“Or earth science?” shouts Rockhound from the back of the room, waving his rock hammer and telescope to get attention. 😃
What’s the telescope for?
So you can locate the pennies?
Tim Cook’s big idea is to offshore — jobs and profits.
Apple produces their products in countries like China where they can pay workers $2 an hour and work them 66 hour weeks and Apple holds some $200 billion in cash in offshore accounts to avoid paying US corporate income tax.
At the current corporate income tax rate, that would bring in about $70 billion (if Cook did not continue to evade taxes for his company) which would go quite a ways if applied to schools,especially in underresourced districts. And NOT to buy Apple products, but to purchase supplies and other things that are actually needed.
I love how the spokespeople for “girls in STEM” is DeVos and Ivanka Trump. They can’t find anyone who actually studied in a STEM field?
I guess that wouldn’t draw as many cameras, some ordinary science person up there. There have to be thousands just in the federal government.
Since Trump is not interested in science and is destroying science programs, it makes perfect sense to have two non-scientists (Betsy and Ivanka) representing women in science.
Women shouldn’t be in science anyway. They should be in the kitchen. Barefoot and pregnant.
Maybe they couldn’t find any women scientists who were willing to be used as props.
Does Betsy D even know what a scientist is?
Her idea of scientist is undoubtedly someone who studies domestication of dinosaurs during the Flintstone Era.
I watched Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump visiting what looks like a summer enrichment program yesterday.
Didn’t the Trump budget propose cuts to just these programs?
They’re such clowns in DC. No believes anything they say for a reason. They spend the whole day playing these stupid, deceptive games, using members of the public as props.
A few years ago Houston decided to offer free market electricity service so the people would “benefit” from all the competition. The many “choices” from the plans require people to have a law degree in contracts to sort out all the fine print from the many providers. I owned a building in the Houston suburbs in which the electricity was provided by a co-op at the same time. The rates from the co-op were always significantly better than any deal from the free market providers whose priority was profit. Privatization of any necessity always results in greater expense, and in many cases, the service provided is worse. I am tired of hearing about the wonders of the “invisible hand” whose real goal it seems is to strangle the middle class.
Privatization means, in a nutshell: Pay More, Get Less.
there’s the real math
Amen! Agree, mathman.
And computer programming is not science!
“Em(inem)-Care”
E-m-care is really great
Though they charge ungodly rate
Gives out M&Ms to kids
So their parents won’t blow lids
What drives me insane is that the rest of the wealthy industrialized democracies have figured out how to deliver health care to all its citizens and no one goes bankrupt from medical costs. The same exact drugs cost a fraction of what they do in the US. We have even figured out how to deliver “universal” health care to people 65 and older at much more affordable costs; Medicare is not totally free but the costs are manageable for most seniors with Medicaid as a backup for the poor. We have been going through this deplorable health care song and dance for far too long. Enough already, we should have improved and expanded Medicare for all NOW! Instead, we are going in reverse from the pathetic ACA which was better than nothing.
When the voters keep voting for representatives that oppose any function for government other than the military, we will continue to move backwards. Trump wants to kick transsexuals out of the military, and some of these individuals have been in the service for more than a decade. If these people perform their duties, why should they be forced out to appease a bigoted “commander in chief?”
He’s doing it for political reasons.
Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate will have to defend spending money on transgendered members of the service next year. It’s the old Republican strategy of using inconsequential wedge issues as a way to ignore substantive issues.
He couldn’t care less about the transgendered service people he’s thrown under the bus. They are just casualties in his effort to consolidate power.
Although the premise of this story (& lots of these comments, esp. as to charters) is sickening, let’s look at some light at the end of the tunnel–which Diane, herself, has been instrumental in creating. “Charter world” has been exposed–here in this blog, on John Oliver’s show, on Thom Hartmann’s radio & TV shows (I know, I know–it’s RT), & in some newspapers (we in Chicago have great hopes for the Chicago Sun-Times–bought by a formal mayoral candidate & some unionists, it’s been looking good thus far {we subscribe}–one of their longtime “watchdog” writers has become the managing editor, in fact). Charter teachers have been unionizing. IOW, attention is being paid, & this could mean maybe, just maybe msm will get on the bus, particularly how put off & ridiculed they have been by Trump. It’s GOOD news that an organization as important & as powerful as the NAACP has called for a moratorium.
&–back to the topic–what’s been happening in Congress vis-a-vis killing the ACA & the defection of Republicans (finally–REAL people who are concerned about human beings & who want to serve their constituents!)–well, again, real light at the tunnel’s end.
(And more Dems & others talking about the need for single-payer–Al Gore did, the other night on Colbert, & then was on other media outlets.)
Thus, I optimistically say to all of you (&, through your blog comments here, have been informing people on a daily basis), once again, yes WE can…WE have…and WE WILL.
Keep fighting & writing!
What could go wrong putting profiteers in charge of non-profit operations?
There is an easy solution that would be embraced by education reformers everywhere:
Allow “charter” emergency rooms to get the same fee per patient to take care of the walk-in emergency patients with strep throat and broken fingers and make sure they get the “right” to ship out all patients with more expensive medical needs to the public emergency room which will get the same fee per patient to take care of them.
After all, it’s no different than having a public library, say the education reformers! Let’s do it for emergency health care, too. What could go wrong?