Privatizing aid to needy worrisome to workers

Nov. 9, 2005, 12:43AM

Privatizing aid to needy worrisome to workers
State is given a three-month conditional OK for corporate-run call centers

By POLLY ROSS HUGHES
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
AUSTIN - Sheila Badzioch's job serving Houston's poor is set to vanish next year as the state rolls out an unprecedented privatization plan to route more needy Texans through corporate-run call centers.
(snip)

The federal government, in a letter sent to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission this week, stressed its own concerns for vulnerable Texans as it granted conditional approval to the project for the next three months.

Badzioch, along with 2,600 eligibility workers statewide and nearly 500 in Houston, will no longer determine whether the poor, hungry or ill are eligible for Medicaid health insurance, food stamps and cash welfare benefits.

Instead, the global outsourcing giant Accenture LLP will screen applicants under a five-year, $899 million call-center contract touted by backers as a modern model of efficiency and convenience for recipients of social welfare benefits.
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3448316
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decision about who are the needy poor in Texas who also make $12 a day?

There is something so wrong with this picture that I can't even grasp the whole....

Sounds like Accenture is going to make a Killing.....

Kind of like Halliburton bringing so much efficiency to "rebulding" Iraq.

This is nauseating. They're going to replace over-worked but college-trained social workers with corporate employees who will do what? Hand out begging bowls? Give tips on how to look leprous so passersby will shell out a few more coins? Talk up the benefits of free enterprise with the down and out?

Well, this kind of took the shine off my joy over the election results.

Hekate

at a rate MUCH more expensive than had been the case when it was done by the state? And was done much more ineffectively (but to the advantage of bushco)?

Isn't it also an off-shoot of the now defunct Arthur Anderson? Shouldn't Texans, of all people, be wary of shennanigans and their costs to fellow texans of anything related to Arthur Anderson?

Unbelievable.

This LLP is offshored in Burmuda I seem to remember. If we have to sell such business to corporations, I'd hope it would be a homegrown American taxpaying one.




edit:sp