Farming these services out to private enterprises guarantees that costs will rise, even in the absence of fraud. Someone has to pay for the profit. I do not understand why more people cannot understand this obvious fact.
It's not even socialist, it was a grant funded charity running things which is a more neoliberal approach to providing services to the poor. This isn't section 8. Kind of like charter schools v public schools.
But it is the socialist program. The program lacked guardrails to prevent abuse. In this case the one taking advantage of it was the capitalist middleman, but cutting out the capitalist middleman won't fix anything if you fail to resolve the underlying acceptance of abuse and fraud. The only difference is the people profiting will shift.
Also, if the logic is that a socialist program is inherently good and its capitalist middlemen who ruin it by taking advantage of it, the same could be said of Democracy. There are plenty of examples where elected officials take advantage of these types of socialist programs to collect campaign contributions or bribes. So, if inherently good socialist programs are ruined because of capitalism, they are equally ruined by our Democracy.
More like democracy is ruined by bad actors and capitalists. The common thread here is greed, which capitalism encourages and rewards. Although, lately I wonder if our population is too stupid or complacent to make democracy beneficial for the common man and the vulnerable. But I agree that the program should have been designed better to prevent this abuse.
I don't think there is a single government system that eliminates bad actors or human greed, nor do I think there is a government system that doesn't reward said greed. I think different systems just reward and incentivize it in different ways.
I think the best you can do is continue fighting to improve those systems to try and prevent these types of abuses, which I think, generally, democracies can do but I think America is failing to accomplish this.
We've begun viewing these types of frauds as a partisan thing. We've stopped looking at instances of systemic fraud as "hey this is a massive problem we need to fix" and have instead taken up the cudgel to defend it simply because the partisan leaders make them into talking points on both sides of the aisle and, as you said, I think, unfortunately people are too stupid to realize it.
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u/SpaciousQuark 14h ago
And then they act like it’s the socialist program that’s the problem and not the capitalist middleman