Perception is reality

This is getting to be a habit. I start my morning by making the coffee and letting the cat in. Cat frivolity ensues. Then, with coffee close by and a cat in my lap, I begin reading the feeds. Gmail is first and I quickly delete the BACN…that’s SPAM that you subscribe to but never read. Then I read Time Goes By. And most mornings I’m moved to comment on the topic I see there. This morning it’s about Medicare and its failings. But wait…Medicare hasn’t failed. It’s those who oversee it that have failed. Administrators at the lowest level and all the way up to the President, where the buck stops; those are the guilty parties. And it’s that way with every single government program. (That may not be true…but it is my perception)

What if we fixed programs that were meant to help the citizens; that’s us, instead of canceling them because they are broken? Wow! What a thought!

On a personal note; as a former construction estimator I can tell you that every bid on a government project; local to federal, reflected the fact that it cost more to perform government work than the same work in the private sector. Every bid, every time. And if we were unlucky enough to actually secure a government project, we knew we had made an error in our bid.

Sure, there are plenty of contractors who do governments work, but they do it on purpose. They are structured to perform in illogical ways and to charge plenty for it. Think KBR. And these contractors rarely venture out into the private sector, just as we rarely ventured into government work.

I know it’s a little bit of a stretch from Medicare to construction…but the core dynamics of government at work are always the same. And that is what needs to change. Don’t throw away the programs, just fix them.