Hull is sick. He rails against "statists," defines what "statists" think, what "statists" want, as if talking about the very minorities he protests to "protect." It's a bugaboo in his own mind. The consequences of deregulation are evidence enough of its folly, and that the "invisible hand" of the pure free market is purely a conservative pipe-dream.
"Last month, a report on nursing homes from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 10 years in the making, showed that more than 90 percent of these homes are chronically understaffed and that patient care suffers as a result. George W. Bush's response was that consumers need to be better informed. You can just imagine an 89-year-old sovereign consumer, perhaps with diabetes and Alzheimer's, traipsing around with a walker, investigating comparative staffing levels at diverse nursing homes. Bush's response is doubly insulting: Most nursing homes are financed by Medicaid, whose rates are set so low that decent staffing is impossible. But if Medicaid raised its reimbursements, regulation would still be needed to ensure that the money went to better nursing care, not to line the pockets of entrepreneurs.
Only the details change. In the 1920s, public-utility holding companies got control of local utilities, sold watered stock to the public, enriched insiders, and raised prices. Same story as Enron, different particulars. New Deal legislation prohibited such abuses--but it has been under assault for a decade from a new generation of wannabe sharks who disparage "Depression-era regulation" as hopelessly out of date."
The Road to Enron
prospect.org |
