September 6, 2012

News

NJ: N.J. prepares to bet on privatized lottery.  New Jersey officials will meet Thursday morning in Trenton with the companies that will submit proposals to take over and privatize the management of the New Jersey Lottery, an initiative that could include launching the state’s first Internet lottery games. …Since it was launched in 1970, the New Jersey Lottery has contributed more than $20 billion to education and state institutions, according to the state…Among the companies planning to attend Thursday’s meeting is GTECH Corp., which has been supplying lottery technology to New Jersey since 1984….According to the RFP, the lottery has 150 employees and sells tickets through about 6,500 retailers statewide, and is now expanding that to 6,700 retailers.  NJ Biz

FL: Jackson bids to privatize emergency rooms.  Jackson Health System president and CEO Carlos Migoya is seeking to privatize the emergency room services in its facilities for adults and pediatric patients by Oct. 1 — a move the union involved is calling “irresponsible.”… “To just to hand [emergency services] over to a private company is irresponsible,” said Martha Baker, a registered nurse and president of SEIU Local 1991, which represents 5,000 Jackson healthcare workers. “This puts profits over patient safety in this community; turning it over to private company that is driven by profits.””.. Ms. Baker said the county’s public health system does not have a primary care strategy and residents depend on the emergency room.  Miami Today

NH: Activist raps privatizing corrections.  If New Hampshire privatizes its prisons, it will spend more, not less, and risk losing control of corrections for good, according to activist Caroline Isaacs, who’s in the state this week lobbying against private prisons. Isaacs, program director for the American Friends Service Committee in Tucson, Ariz., issued a blistering report in February about Arizona’s several private prisons. Isaacs found security in private prisons lacking, staff poorly trained and the cost of housing an inmate higher at private prisons than at state-run prisons, according to her report. And, none of the private companies are measuring recidivism, according to her report.  Concord Monitor

Diane Ravitch: The speech Obama should give to help him win…One more thing. I realize that we were wrong to require states to allow more privately managed schools as a condition of getting money from the Race to the Top. Through our mistakes, we inadvertently unleashed a movement to privatize our nation’s public schools and to turn them into for-profit centers for equity investors and technology corporations. This is unacceptable. Folks on the right have wanted to privatize our schools for half a century. We can’t let that happen. When we look around the world, we see that the top-performing nations have great public systems. We do not want to revive a dual school system in our nation’s cities, dividing up our public funds between a weakened public system and aggressive charter chains. Washington Post Blog