Virginia Foxx Favored Privatization of Mental Health Care

Though Virginia Foxx has been cagey in her public utterances about President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, she was very open in the North Carolina Senate about her enthusiasm for the privatization of much of state government.

Take the care doled out by the state to the severely mentally handicapped. Foxx led the charge to privatize the mental health program in the state.

In May 2002, amid rising alarm that the mandate to privatize mental health services was going to put chronically disturbed people in local emergency rooms, Foxx was quoted as blithely unconcerned:

"My attitude is that if you have funds that are sufficient to pay for a service, that entrepreneurs will show up," she was quoted in the Business Journal. "If you build it, or if you allow it, they will come."