You do realize that you are merely substantiating my position that the people run the government only tangentially, don't you?
I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. It isn't that I think people will be refused randomly; it's that I think that in time they will be refused as a matter of course. In much the same way that the government routinely refuses Medicaid and Social Security disability to people who truly deserve it.
Deserve it, or have a right to it under the rules? The question is which group has a higher rate of improper refusal of benefits: those covered by private insurance or those covered by public insurance? There are also appeals procedures. How many people continue to get improperly rejected? There is a benefit for a private company to delay payments, but no benefit for the government to do so - not at any level.
My experience has been that bureaucrats who work in government offices know their jobs are secure and they couldn't care less in terms of loyalty or appreciation when it comes to their taxpayer customer base. This isn't to say that some don't do their jobs in a pleasant, helpful manner, but I've never seen, heard or read anything that indicates to me that the person behind the counter at a government office or sitting in a cubicle making decisions about benefits feels that slightest bit of alliegance or loyalty to taxpayers.
Perhaps you are reading this into their attitudes? I'm not saying they are humming Yankee Doodle Dandy while they work, but my experience has been pretty good. Sometimes they are hemmed in by paperwork, often the result of a legislator crying fraud which makes the 99% of the people who are honest prove that they are. My mother worked for a time reviewing cases in the New York Health and Hospitals Corp. (public) and as far as I can tell no one she knew there took pleasure in throwing out cases that weren't clearly crap. I worked one summer for the Post Office, and people there were pretty anal about getting the mail delivered accurately.
On the other hand, we have a Pit thread running right now from a guy working in customer service who is instructed to say "no" to anyone asking for anything out of spec.
The difference there is that you have numerous options other than Mickey D's. When it comes to government benefits and what it decrees you either get or don't get, you have no other choice. You just have to suck it up and take what you get (or don't get).
The problem is when an industry segment - like health insurance - has structural reasons to screw its customer. Every risky customer turned down for a pre-existing condition helps the bottom line. Every month of delay in paying benefits does also. You've read the many Doper stories about this. For me, I've had no unjustified refusals in 12 years of coverage at my company. We are self-insured, so turning us down doesn't help the bottom line of the insurance company. Coincidence? I think not.
The high level of satisfaction with Medicare makes me think that they don't turn people down as much. Certainly my father and f-i-l seem to have had no problems, but that is too small a sample to say for sure.
I'm not really talking about obnoxious people; I'm talking about people who simply don't care and make who make decisions related to health care and other benefits based solely on what they're told to do by their superiors. If their superiors say "We're adopting the practice of automatically denying disability benefits upon first application and first and second appeal, then that's what they'll do...and then they'll get pissed at people who complain about it and challenge it because their department's policy creates a culture that sets them at odds with deserving applicants and they have no say in it anyway. So an attitude of detachment takes hold and they operate largely as automotons and couldn't care less what the recipients of their decisions think about them.
A manager who takes this policy is being obnoxious in my book, since that is clearly not what the people who wrote the laws had in mind. How far up do you think such a policy would get supported? In fact, most government agencies, given some reasonable level of funding, have every reason to spend all their budget and not save it, unlike industry. I once sold a very expensive set of training credits to a government lab because the department had money left in their budget for the year, and didn't want to waste it. If you were complaining about the government shoveling money out without proper checking, then I can see it, because that is where the incentives are. You seem to be talking about outliers - which I suspect are rare.
But even so, they aren't the real problem. The people higher up who make the decisions to routinely deny benefits in the first place are. And complaining to one's congressman is unlikely to accomplish anything, or if it does, it's only to that particular complainant.
You think a higher up is going to risk really being reamed by doing it to other people? Why? Do you think these people get bonuses for underspending their budgets? What do you think is better for the career of the head of an agency - ending the year with a surplus, and getting his budget cut, or spending all his money and having a reason to ask for more, and for more people? I started out working for a part of the Bell System which operated under this paradigm, and I assure you that underspending was not considered a good thing.
I have. And in most cases by far I've gotten a satisfactory response. Businesses by and large have to rely on customer good will in order to stay in business and/or to maximize their sales and profits. Government is under no such fear. It couldn't care less whether you're happy with its decsions or not.
Yeah, subprime mortgage brokers really, really cared about their customers. A business clearly has incentive to give you the minimum necessary to keep you - assuming you are the kind of customer they make money on. Now look at someone in the frontlines of a government office. Whyever would they want to deny a claim and get yelled at when it makes no difference to them or the agency if they pay it? It makes no sense.
I know what you mean. Same thing here in the small suburban bedroom community I life in which is next to a sprawling metropolitan area of close to 1.5 million people. However, in that larger metropolitan area it's not at all uncommon to arrive at the DMV to take a driving test and have to sit and wait for hours and hours, and then at 4:30 p.m. be told that no more applicants would be processed that day and come back again tomorrow. So people are constantly having to take a day off work, spend that day sitting on their ass waiting for the bureaucracy to take care of them, and then having to take another day off to come sit on their ass again in hope of finally getting their driver's licence the next day.
Nope. Not exactly a small place. It was quite crowded, actually - almost no space in the parking lots, almost no chairs available. The secret is that they have an on-line reservation system. If I just walked in I would have to wait; but since I had a reservation I went to the head of the virtual line. I got my first license in New York, so I know my big city DMVs pretty well.
When my daughter took her road test it didn't take that much longer. It is worse than usual because they close two Fridays a month due to the budget crisis. So, sorry. If you plan ahead, you don't have to wait. Just like in private industry.
Businesses do not operate that way. Only entities that don't care (because they don't have to) do.
You've never had to wait on hold for an hour, have you?
Which brings to mind another problem that plagues government bureaucracies, and that is the matter of funding. With proper funding, there would be enough examiners and enough people shuffling paperwork so that people wouldn't have to take a number and sit all one day and part of the next waiting to be taken care of. Businesses generally have sufficient people on duty to take care of their customers. Since government doesn't really have customers but rather some form of supplicants, its attitude is different.
Which cabbage patch have you been hiding in? Been to a department store lately? Businesses lay off people for the bottom line as much as possible, and then overwork anyone remaining. Hell, I've taken on a couple of new jobs for this very reason. Now, I'm not denying your point about proper funding, but who do you think is responsible for that? Is it the heads of agencies, who have every incentive to grow, or is it the tax and government haters, who yell at spending too much on bureaucrats - and then yell about having to wait too long when they need government services. If you wait two hours to see a clerk in the DMV you should be grateful for all the tax money they are saving. But you are not alone. One of the problems with the California budget is that everyone wants lower taxes and everyone also wants more services.
