On Thursday, May 28, at 7 pm, the League of Women Voters of the Northampton Area, Sudbury, and Amherst Healthcare Committee, will jointly host the webinar; “We Pay–They Profit: Public Goods in Private Hands”. The speaker will be Donald Cohen, founder and Executive Director of In the Public Interest. While the program is being organized by health care advocates, it is hoped that people interested in private profiteering in other domains–such as utilities, prisons, or public lands–will find relevance to those issues as well.
LWVN, together with other local leagues, is a co-sponsor of this webinar.
About the Speaker
Donald Cohen and In the Public Interest (ITPI), the nonpartisan non-profit organization he founded, study health care, public education, infrastructure, and other public goods. He has led numerous studies highlighting the harms of privatization: in 2013,”Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations;” in 2016, “How Privatization Increases Inequality,” a report examining how the insertion of private interests into the provision of public goods and services, including education, public health, and water,
hurts people of color and poor individuals and families. More recently, in 2021, Cohen published *The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back.
About the Issue: Privatization
Privatization has become disturbingly widespread…seeping into every aspect of our society, from our [hospitals and clinics], schools, and food inspection, to weather forecasting, to even the administration of our public welfare systems” (*The New Republic*). Private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy.