The horns of a dilemma

[unixronin]

I'm baffled.

On the one hand, I find it difficult to conceive of this massive level of organized, concerted, bumbling incompetence taking place without those at the top of the command chain -- and here, the command chain goes from Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, to the Director of Homeland Security, to George Bush -- raising all kinds of holy hell to get effective action underway.  (Edit:  It's been observed that Brown's previous job was running the International Arabian Horse Association, which he ran into the ground and got fired from for it, then pumped it up on his resumé to make it sound like a more important and better-connected job than it really was.)  On the other hand, I find myself unable to conceive of any plausible hidden agenda -- be it financial or political -- that could lie behind the slowness and obstructiveness of the Gulf Coast hurricane disaster relief being intentional.  Surely any possible hoped-for political gain would be neutralized by the negative effect of the worldwide visibility of the complete incompetence our government has displayed.  It's disasters of this scale that the Department of Homeland Security was chartered to handle and prevent; you can't prevent a hurricane, but as far as handling response after the event, it looks as though you're better off not being protected at all than being protected by Homeland Security.  (As an aside, interdictor says it's very easy to tell the folks who joined Homeland Security out of a desire to protect and serve from those who joined to bully and intimidate people under the color of authority.)  The lesson of Homeland Security so far seems to be that the efficiency and effectiveness of any government agency fall in geometric proportion to its size, and when you put together a department as big as Homeland Security, its actual usefulness asymptotically approaches zero.

Something needs to change, and it needs to change soon; but I don't know whether America as it now is has the spirit and the determination left to go through its government from top to bottom and cut out all the deadwood.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I have what may be a bad question. Or maybe it's simply one that requires thought.

You and I and many others we care about are tied, in my case irreversably (and in your case, for at least a good little while), to the medical system. If I don't get medicine on a regular basis, at a minimum I lose my ability to make my living. This means that I'm also loosely coupled to the insurance system. If I had to pay cash for medical attention, I could do it for a while; it would be a hardship, but I could. There might come a time when I need more serious help, though, and would need an environment in which I had access to and means to pay for some fairly high-tech methods and medicines.

These are not federal resources; they are mostly corporate run, or in some cases run by municipalities or even in some cases by religious or other charity groups. But those of us in less than perfect health do need them in order to continue to be effective forces for freedom.

Can we do the necessary re-vamping of FedGov without disturbing these structures so much that we lose their benefit?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think the answer to that can be seen by considering the number of doctors who are dropping out of the system. They don't take insurance -- ANY insurance -- but because they don't have to do the insurance company's paperwork or jump through the insurance company's hoops, they can give you an office visit for close what your insurance company makes you ante up as a copayment. The entire medical-insurance, healthcare-for-profit system is as badly broken as our government is; right now, "How much health can you afford" is right up there beside "How much justice can you afford."

It's clearly not the only way to do it. America loves to sneer at Canada and Britain, for example, for having "socialized" medical systems. But those systems WORK, and they protect the poor right alongside the rich.

I don't have a detailed plan for how to revamp either the government or the medical system. But I suspect both would operate more efficiently and at less cost if, instead of building vast Federal bureaucracies, the watchword was "Do everything at the most local level at which it is feasible to do it."

And that brings us directly back to "That government is best which governs least," doesn't it?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Something else I'm having a hard time selling to some folks is the idea of independent standards agencies. In the aviation industry, most of the safety checking, both airplanes and pilots, is done by independent examiners, who are in turn licensed by FedGov.

I'm also having a hard time selling the idea of distributed credibility. But both of these ideas - the idea that as much of the current function of government as can be privatized should be. Not sure why that is... folks are getting institutionalized?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Perhaps use UL as an example?

"How much do you trust the FDA to tell you whether something is safe? ...OK. How about CBS or ABC? Remember the pickup trucks they blew up to show how they could catch fire on their own? Yeah. Now, how much do you trust UL to tell you whether something is safe?"

I believe TUV, the German standards body, is an independent body, too. And the British standards Institute, while it holds a charter from Parliament, operates entirely independently of it and Parliament does not, and cannot, tell it what to approve. The most, as I understand it, that Parliament can do is request that BSI study and develop a draft standard for something or other. The Snell Foundation that evaluates and certifies motorcycle helmets in the US is also an independent foundation. (DOT helmet standards, by contrast, are all but worthless.)

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Let's be honest here, the serious hard luck cases in Canada and Britain COME HERE and pay cash to get transplants done on a schedule that saves their lives.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Does that balance out all the folks who go to Canada to get medication that the FDA is still dragging its heels on approving in the US? Both systems have flaws. Canada's at least doesn't have the vast numbers of completely uninsured who can't afford any medical care at all.
I think it should be possible to come up with a way to have most of the advantages of both while minimizing the flaws -- provided it's being designed with the primary objective of providing good medical care for everyone, instead of making a good fat profit providing medical care for the people who can afford it. (Part of the picture would have to be overhauling the medical malpractice system, too. Malpractice insurance is driving too many doctors and hospitals out of business because people are getting away with, for example, filing malpractice suits for congenital birth defects.)