Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

John Young

With apologies to Annie Get Your Gun, ever since the Republican House takeover in 2002, the Texas Legislature has become a musical comedy with one lyrical theme:

Anything government can do, business can do better.

Business can do anything better than that.

No, it can’t.

In fact, to this point, you could call state privatization of human services a certifiable disaster.

You may not know that. Not your fault. Most Texans don’t know this story, an indictment of how little relevant information gets imparted in the “information age.”

Credit also goes to the politics of division and diversion. When, for instance, policmakers trot out a red herring like banning already-illegal gay marriage, they can distract the masses from a whole bunch of bad policy.

With little debate and even less forethought, in 2003, GOP leadership launched two massive privatization efforts. One was delivering public aid — food stamps, Medicaid and more — through privately run call centers. The other was in mental health and mental retardation — MHMR — an agency subdivided and parceled out under a giant restructuring.

Problems with the first have gotten the most ink, with former Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn using it as a campaign issue against Gov. Rick Perry.

Unmet expectations

Rather than save taxpayers money — $646 million in savings over five years, pledged Team Perry — Bermuda-based Accenture was $100 million over budget running state call centers in a pilot effort, said Strayhorn.

Last month was when the state plan for call centers was to go statewide. Instead, with Accenture overwhelmed and its automated system misfiring, the Health and Human Services Commission sounded retreat and scaled back its contract. Last summer, more than 2,000 state employees, notified that privatization would make their jobs unnecessary, were told: Wait, we still need you.

Sixty state lawmakers have called on HHSC to cancel Accenture’s contract.

Once again, that’s the privatization debacle that’s gotten the ink.

The one that didn’t involved MHMR. A sweeping directive inserted in conference committee into omnibus legislation in 2003 called for community MHMR centers to seek private contractors in providing services to the mentally ill and mentally retarded. It did not require that these providers demonstrate they could save the taxpayers money. Essentially the directive was: Do it.

The state previously had tried the same with state homes for the retarded and mentally ill, at that time setting out cost-savings thresholds that bidders would have to meet.

Guess what? The state found out that it didn’t have many willing and able contractors who could.

As a result, the Legislature voted to abolish the MHMR privatization directive in 2005. But Perry vetoed the bill. The result was an executive order to devise rules for how to find suitable alternatives to government-run services if available, with community MHMR centers as “providers of last resort.”

Good luck with your search, guys. “There was no great white whale of private providers standing outside the door to provide these services,” said Joe Lovelace, associate director for behavioral health for the Texas Council of Community MHMR Centers.

Even if contractors were lined up, they weren’t offering big, big savings in dealing with gritty challenges like serving the mentally ill.

The fact is that the state had a system in place, one that scrambled to do a tough job with too few resources, but did so on a community basis and with collaborative networks deep and wide.

With anti-government bromides at the ready, the newly ruling clique in Austin in 2002 said, heck, private enterprise can do that.

No, it can’t.