This effort is wrongheaded because it assumes that for-profit business can always provide a service more efficiently than government and to the benefit of taxpayers. In the process, it runs the risk of private providers cutting costs in public facilities - and thereby compromising safety and quality of care - in order to create wealth for owners or shareholders. When that occurs, as it often does, the basic duty of government to humanely punish and rehabilitate criminals or to care for the severely mentally ill can be ignored.

That said, the private market does have its virtues. In many contexts, market competition controls costs, creates efficiency and drives innovation in ways that government bureaucracies do not. But it is dangerous to subject vulnerable populations, whether they be prison inmates at the mercy of corrections officers or patients at the mercy of debilitating mental illnesses, to the tender ministrations of market capitalism.

Nevertheless, the leadership of the Legislature has created a special subcommittee that will hold six hearings on the relationship between private industry and government. Among other issues, it will consider privatizing state prisons and the mental hospital.

The leadership also has ordered a performance audit of the hospital, which will focus on quality and type of care and the need for additional bed space.

One member of the committee, Rep. Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was one of a group of five Utah legislators who visited a privately managed Florida mental hospital at the request of lobbyist Rob Jolley, who represents Geo Care, a private firm that operates hospitals and prisons. Lockhart sponsored an unsuccessful bill in this year's session to create a bidding process that could have resulted in private management and operation of the Utah State Hospital.

The subcommittee was requested by Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, who also was invited on the Florida tour and who in 2006 sponsored an unsuccessful bill to privatize the state prison.

This gives an inkling of where this subcommittee might be headed.