As usual, we are deeply disturbed. This month we are deeply disturbed by the dire situation of bureaucrats in North Korea. A blog covering North Korea reports that bureaucrats are not receiving their food rations:
“After food distribution being halted, many low-ranking officials stopped showing up for work. Instead, they started picking on people. They carry out frivolous inspections anytime they want to extort people,” said a source from North Hamkyung Province….
North Korean news sources must be read with keen attention to anti-bureaucrat media bias. A bureaucrat looking for her food ration is not frivolously inspecting or picking on people. Finding food rations is a matter of bureaucratic life and death. The North Korean bureaucrats probably were detailed from their usual jobs to work on resolving the problem of the missing food rations. But they cannot be expected to carry out this additional important work alone. The United Nations, agricultural departments in high-income industrialized countries, and large international aid organizations should come together to organize emergency aid for North Korean bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats need to reject divisiveness and unify to move progress forward. With typical anti-bureaucrat media bias, the autoblog entitles a news report, “Confirmed! Bureaucrats have no sense of humor, funny stop signs nixed.” If you read the report, however, you will learn that one group of bureaucrats implemented a novel public policy that some find humorous, while another, higher-ranking group of bureaucrats eliminated this policy on the grounds that it was inconsistent with state regulations. This is an example of bureaucratic divisiveness. That’s not funny. The higher-ranking bureaucrats should have adjusted state regulations to accommodate the innovative and useful initiative of the lower-ranking bureaucrats.
The Music City Oracle complains that bureaucrats are carefully and accurately implementing Grapevine school policies. This account does not indicate the legal status of the relevant school policies. Under classic doctrines of separation of legislative and executive functions and of procedural integrity in rule-making, bureaucrats cannot ignore in administration a law’s plain meaning. The solution is less law and more bureaucratic discretion.
4&20 blackbirds offers Eleven Rules for All Bureaucrats. Gifford Pinchot, a pioneering bureaucrat as the first chief of the United State Forest Service, developed these rules early in the twentieth century. Everyone, including even current-day Internet entrepreneurs, would be wise to follow Pinchot’s ninth rule:
9. Don’t be afraid to give credit to someone else even when it belongs to you. This is the mark of a weak man, but is the hardest lesson to learn. Encourage others to do things. You may accomplish many things through others that you can’t get done on your single initiative.
Rich Maltzman, PMP, at Scope crêpe describes The Big Yellow Taxi of Project Management. He observes:
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…”. These words, from a Joni Mitchell song of 1970, and re-popularized by the Counting Crows more recently, should strike a resonant note with PMs. … I certainly don’t mean to take away from Joni Mitchell’s lyric ability, but perhaps she should have said, “you don’t know what might be taken away, until you know what your objectives are”. But…then again, to be fair, (1) Joni did not have access to the 3rd Edition PMBOK(R) Guide, and (2) I don’t think this lyric would be very marketable.
Excellent points, Rich.
El Burro at Wonky Donky reports “CBS Buys Bleeding-Edge Company CNET, Color Tele-Vision To Follow“. Burro remarks, “CBS taking huge risk on this sure-to-fail, n’er-do-well ‘in-ter-net’ contraption. Base-jumping Thomas Edison admires their foresight and risk-tolerance! Look out, Radio Corporation of America!!! Videos of high-tech CBS masterminds at work!” The videos make the picture clear. This is a newsworthy bureaucratic development!
Jose DeJesus MD submitted “The Crisis in Medical Care Funding.” He gives as an example a charge of $20 for disposable gloves and observes,
If a physician attempted to include such charges on a patient’s bill there would be accusations of gouging or possible criminal charges of fraud, but when a hospital does it, they rationalize it through a cost allocation formula that makes sense only to a hospital administrator.
A good economist working in a government bureaucracy would recognize that this cost is not cost-justified.
Alvaro Fernandez submitted “Exercise your brain in the Cognitive Age.” He remarks, “Key questions on ‘brain training’ that politicians and, yes, bureaucrats, should pay attention to.” Bureaucrats regularly exercise their brains on the job. I presume that Mr. Fernandez did not mean to suggest otherwise.
Michael Bass submittted “Getting out of Jury Duty.” He remarks, “You see, the founders of our country knew that the jury would serve as a fortress, protecting individual rights against a legal system which desires to propagate unjust laws onto its citizens.” Bureaucratic ethics do not allow a bureaucrat to shirk her duty. The difficult question, however, is what that duty is in cases not clearly specified in a job description. Perhaps that situation is related to Mr. Bass’s observations.
That’s all for this month’s Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival’s regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival’s category page.
Thank you for including an excerpt from my article about the US health care system.
The main point of the article is that we currently have a situation where there is a government-created oligopoly of providers, through centralized planning and approval of health care facilities, and an oligopsony of payers (health insurance companies, employer groups, and government health benefit programs) that have carved out special deals for members of their groups, without concern for the economic impacts of these special deals on the providers or those members of the public that do not belong to groups that benefit from “negotiated” (I call it take-it-or-leave-it) pricing. The result is a great exaggeration in the price differential between those who benefit from deals and those who do not.
One obvious alternative to the status quo is to simply mandate pricing levels across the board, which probably would not be upheld by the courts, and if nothing is done to affect the ever-increasing costs shouldered by providers due to unfunded government mandates, malpractice insurance, and the general effects of an inflationary environment, the attrition rate of health care providers will accelerate just when we need more of them to serve an aging population.
Another alternative suggested by some is to mandate 100% participation in some form of group health plan. Certainly this will help level the playing field on the consumer side, but without addressing the actual costs shouldered by providers, this will not be sustainable.
Unless the public is willing to suffer a huge drop in the quality and quantity of service that it has enjoyed to date, something will need to be done to address the costs imposed on providers, and controls that have created an oligopoly of suppliers will need to be gradually loosened to allow the private sector to offer competitive services. I’m not suggesting free-for-all anarchy, but there needs to be change, and the private sector is the historically successful incubator of innovative ways to deliver goods and services to the public. I don’t think that anyone in the US seriously wants us to follow the model of Canada or the UK.
I’ve discussed this topic in further depth in the full article, where I invite your readers comments.
Doug>The higher-ranking bureaucrats should have adjusted state regulations to accommodate the innovative and useful initiative of the lower-ranking bureaucrats.
I disagree. The higher-ranking bureaucrats should have provided a separate and parallel set of circumstances under which such initiative is accepted, and retained the set that precluded it. Changing the rules isn’t fair, nor is it appropriately bureaucratic. Adding new rules is both.
“controls that have created an oligopoly of suppliers will need to be gradually loosened to allow the private sector to offer competitive services.”
We already have the private sector, private hospitals and private physicians, competing. The problems is control of number of medical schools and graduates by the AMA which reduces supply while assuring those graduates a salary unseen in any other country because of shortages only marginally addressed by the influx of foreign medical graduates.
Dr. DeJesus, interesting comments. I’m glad that you are thinking and writing about these issues.
Andy, good points. I agree completely.
Topiary Cow, interesting points, but perhaps more relevant to the past than today. From what I’ve heard anecdotally, average doctor earnings have been falling over the past decade or so.
Strange but true, Cow would not have imagined physician salaries to fall. Reference