The White House goes condo

...It is the equivalent of a family trying to make ends meet by selling off the silver it inherited...

...Arnold Relman, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues...

...But whether American institutional life will be significantly different from what it was in 1980 is not clear...

...As the head of Behavior Systems Southwest, one of the new prison corporations, candidly acknowledges, "People don't want to examine their trash, and prisons, as your average person looks at it, are your social trash...

...If the president succeeds in moving the country down the road to privatization, he will have paved the way for the conservative revolution he has been so anxious to bring about...

...The big "if" is privatization...

...Many are already feeling the pressure to turn to students who can pay rather than maintain a blind admissions policy...

...9 Health Care: The key to the new privatization trend in health care has not, however, been so much specific Reagan policies -- like fixed-cost reimbursement for Medicare -- but the administration's creation of an environment in which there are fewer and fewer limits to where the laws of the marketplace should be extended...

...The president's new budget asks for $1.4 billion less in aid for college and university than the year before, and in states such as New York that means a loss of $800 a year each for 30,000 college students...

...The significance of this long-term privatization becomes clear when we look at where it has already become an issue: 9 Housing: At a time when public housing starts are down to a trickle, the president's 1987 budget proposes ending all rental housing development grants, freezing federal subsidies for local public housing projects, and stopping inflation adjustments on federal housing subsidies...

...In addition, although private prisons owners have every reason to want their prisons to be secure, they have no reason to make successful rehabilitation an aim...

...Many of their savings would come from not paying guards the police-level salaries and pensions their unions have won for them, and from making sure the inmates they house are those amenable to inexpensive care -offenders willing to work and able to live in medium- or minimum-security facilities...

...For already burdened public hospitals, the result is added costs and more certainty that the patients they serve are those with nowhere else to go...

...We see it in cities, where one cannot walk down a street or ride a bus without encountering someone with ear phones and a Walkman...

...With college expenses for a child born in 1986 expected to top $100,000 for four years at a private institution, the country is, as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has warned, moving toward "a two-tiered higher education system," one for the poor and another for the rich...

...Once in place, especially if Gramm-Rudman goes into operation, privatization will be extraordinarily difficult to undo...

...Bell obsel'ved, "The wealthy will be the only ones able to attend schools where the tuition is high...

...14 March 1986:143...

...The danger comes from the fact that in operating prison systems, private investors are not promising to make them better, only cheaper...

...But everyone else would be left as before...

...Such changes do not by themselves guarantee that the president's privatization efforts will succeed...

...Such a step will do little to reduce the forces that got the family into debt (in Reagan's case tax cuts plus the military budget), but for a period it will bring in added revenues...

...9 Prisons: As with hospitals, it is the climate of public opinion the administration has helped create, rather than specific policy, that is paving the way for privatization...

...The kind of privatization the president sees as basic was made clear in December when the administration proposed selling off the Federal Housing Authority, which over its history has provided low-cost mortgage insurance for 51 million home-buyers and in 1984 produced a profit of $9.4 million...

...With the median price for a new home more than $84,000, the middle-class house-buyer would be hurt by the housing squeeze that privatization has only made worse...

...W HERE WILL PRIVATIZATION finally lead...

...They create a constituency for whom political privatization is a natural extension of choices already made in their daily lives...

...The 1987 budget would continue government policies which over the last five years have seen federal aid to education drop by 17 percent...

...The for-profit hospitals avoid services that are not profitable, even though they may be of use to the community," Dr...

...As a dual medical system develops, public hospitals get not only the poorest patients, they also get saddled with the kinds of services the for-profit hospitals do not want...

...The administration's get-tough sentencing attitude toward criminals has contributed to the rise in the nation's prison population, but the real key is the $10 billion per year that the country is spending on nearly 750,000 offenders...

...The danger is, however, that we won't take privatization seriously enough or realize it has the capacity to transform the country...

...To a public anxious to avoid spending scarce tax dollars on new prisons, the idea of dumping the responsiiblity on private investors is especially appealing...

...even provides the means for facilitating the prison privatization process...

...They don't like patients who need labor-intensive care, like burn patients, or the chronically ill, or elderly patients...

...A bill introduced in the Senate in 1984 by Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y...

...Privatization has already gone beyond support services to include custody for prisoners, and the National Institution of Corrections predicts that by 1990 we will see as many as a dozen state or federal contracts for operating entire prisons...

...The administration advocates a do-it-yourself system in which, as former Reagan Secretary of Education T.H...

...Among the assets the budget lists as being for sale are Bonneville Dam, Dulles National Airport, the Elk Hills oil reserve, and the National Weather Service's satellites...

...But they do the next best thing...

...The key to the president's effort is not, however, one-shot privatization but a subtler long-term privatization...

...In a recent New York Times column, Russell Baker joked, "Darlings, the privatization going on in Washington is just too much...

...We are a nation in which those who can afford it spend more and more time locked away in private worlds...

...Their future depends on a situation in which crime remains high, judges hand out long sentences, there is a recidivism rate the government cannot cope with, and the public wishes to wash its hands...

...But patient dumping is not the only problem privatization is causing...

...Nor would the poor be the only ones to suffer...

...But it is not only minorities who are losing out...

...The president withdrew his FHA sale proposal in the face of heated congressional opposition, but in the 1987 budget, the administration returned to the same theme...

...The D'Amato bill encourages private prison ownership by providing "sale lease-backs" of new facilities to the government and ~giving the builders of new prisons tax breaks as well...

...9 Education: Here the core of the administration's thinking on privatization is represented by Secretary of Education William Bennett, who argues, "The betterment of oneself in college is still largely a do-it-yourself kind of operation...

...In Britain the Thatcher government has been selling off everything from council housing to British Telecom...

...The administration's proposals would assure the poor of a chance to bid, with the help of vouchers, for the worst available housing, and it would give a small number of lucky public housing families the opportunity to buy their apartments...

...Patient dumping" -- the process of moving the poor from private to public hospitals -- has begun to reach epidemic proportions in such cities as Chicago, where Cook County Hospital, which once received only 60 to 70 patient transfers a month, now gets more than 500...

...Cities such as New York would continue shelling out $1,500 to $2,000 a month to, provide a family with temporary housing, and nothing would be done to help the 2.5 million Americans who lose their homes each year, or to stem the estimated 500,000 low-rent apartments that disappear annually as a result of co-oping, landlord abandonment, and demolition...

...There is nothing subtle about such a strategy...

...The nation's health care system is now being revolutionized by for-profit hospital chains in which the big four -- Hospital Corporation of America, American Medical International, Humana, and National Medical Enterprises -- already own or manage 12 percent of the country's hospitals and are leading a movement in which, by the middle 1990s, ten giant medical firms are expected to provide 50 percent of our medical care...

...Most of all, we see the new cultural privatization in the VCR boom...

...For minority students, who just a year earlier found the aid they were receiving from public colleges down 12.4 Commonweal: 142percent, the Reagan privatization message could not be clearer...

...To make matters worse, the political privatization the president favors now has its equivalent in the privatization that has become a life-style for middle-class America...

...We see this privatization in children for whom computer games have become an afterschool substitute for friends and sports...

...After it is sold, a Bonneville Dam is not going to be bought back by the federal government...

...Although most studies judge that there are upwards of two million homeless people in the country and HUD's Report on the Homeless and Emergency Shelters puts the figure at between 250,000 and 350,000, the administration is, in essence, proposing that the government get out of housing and let the market settle matters...

...Where one-shot privatization involves the direct sale of government assets, long-term privafization is a matter of creating a situation in which -- often through nothing more than a combination of neglect and tax policy -- private interests are given unchallenged political and institutional dominance in an area where the government has previously accepted major responNICOLAUS MILLS, a frequem contributor to Commonweal, teaches at Sarah Lawrence and is on the editorial board of Dissent...

...Then he offered a satiric picture of the retired president and his wife buying a suite in the newfifty-story White House Tower that Donald Trump is building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...

...A student who could not afford the private college his or her abilities merited is not going to return to that college at age forty...

...The significance of this privatization has already been felt by the poor who have no medical insurance, and the new unemployed, who have lost both jobs and health coverage...

...That's expensive...

...The lowered expectations the president wants us to have for what government can do will be neatly balanced by privatization of the institutions that matter most to us...

...They like short stays and a lot of diagnostic studies...

...THE MARCH TOWARD PRIVATIZATIOH The White House goes condo I NICOLAUS MILLS T wo YEARS from now, when Ronald Reagan leaves ofrice, we will be saddled with an enormous national debt and a bloated military establishment...

...So are the colleges...

...There are now more than 20 million VCRs in use, and they are on their way to making home rather than the theater the place to watch movies...

...II sibilities...