This is an excerpt of the column I wrote this week for Deadline Detroit:
By Chad Selweski
In his zeal to reform state government in a business-like manner, Gov. Rick Snyder has relied on favorite buzz words and phrases to reflect his approach toward governing.
Relentless positive action. Reinventing Michigan.
Snyder’s determination to treat those who use government services (essentially all of us) as “customers” and to run government like a business has now produced four spectacular failures: the privatization of prison food services through Aramark; the state-run attempt to turn around the financially and physically crumbling Detroit Public Schools; the outsourced health care imposed at the state’s Grand Rapids nursing home for military veterans; and, of course, the Flint water crisis.
In each case, the expected savings proved largely illusory while the quality of services dropped precipitously, even tragically.
Now, the governor eyes a new target for the privatization of government: the state’s $2.4 billion mental health care system. Snyder’s proposed budget blueprint introduced last month calls for turning over a large portion of the funding to private insurance companies.
In a familiar refrain, critics warn that the potential financial gains would be minimal while care would suffer for many of Michigan’s most vulnerable: the mentally ill, those with behavioral disorders, autistic children, and those with developmental disabilities or chronic substance abuse problems.
The Snyder plan has been dubbed an attempt to “profitize” mental health care in Michigan. Medicaid money would flow through HMOs rather than directly to community mental health departments that operate in the open and have overhead costs that are half that of private insurers.
Continue reading here.
If he’s so bent on running government like a business, he should resign. That’s what a private sector CEO who failed do badly would have to do. For the good of the company/ brand/state. Pure Michigan is nothing more than a punchline now. He has destroyed our brand and has to go. Government like a business? It works both ways, dude.