[Peace-discuss] Public med school for private profit

[David Green]

Public med school for private profit Mon, 03/23/2015 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette      The new medical school is right out of the neo-liberal playbook, with its leveraging of public infrastructure for private profit. That infrastructure and its research capacity have long been sustained by public funds from all levels of government.Add to that private investment and medical student debt, and the result will be niche products and services to the benefit of Carle and pharmaceutical and biotech corporations — all paid for with profits to spare by the health insurance industry, from our paychecks and public funds. The fact that this venture doesn't "cost" the taxpayers shouldn't distract us from the reality that while the public provides its institutional basis, the broader public will not benefit in any perceptible way, even aside from ongoing erosion of the property tax base. Nor should this educational and medical gentrification distract us from increasing economic inequality, poverty and blight, and our broken privatized health care system. This form of investment — despite the grandiose claims of its supporters — not only does not address these structural realities, it exacerbates them. The massive public investment that is needed in so many areas is wished away, becoming merely the opportunity cost for this glitzy, high-tech profit and power fix for the local 1 percent. University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise makes no bones about her "vision" of the corporatized, privatized research university.Ultimately, this whole process has been routinely undemocratic: just one more fait accompli presented to a bewildered and shell-shocked public by those who claim to know better while they engage in blatant self-aggrandizement.DAVID GREENChampaign
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