People are often critical of government. Compare two recent activities: trying to get seats on a plane and filing for social security.
After Internet attempts and telephone calls aplenty, I still have no seats on an upcoming plane trip. This has happened repeatedly over the last few years. You hit a snag and there is no real person to discuss it with. The airlines are insistent that you figuring it out yourself. I've had similar problems with Comcast, Amazon, etc. I finally just gave up on the money Amazon owed me for returned goods. If my time has any value at all, I had to or go nuts.
Two weeks ago, I filed a short form online to begin receiving Social Security benefits. It took me ten minutes. Yesterday I got a call from a very polite woman, checking to see if there was an error in my having reported no income in 1997 (I didn't work that year). She asked me if I was sure I want to start collecting early. I said yes. She said she was processing my request and the first check would come within a few weeks.
The government was able to take care of a complex procedure in a total of 15 minutes. They were polite and thanked me for my time. I didn't speak with someone in India. I didn't have to follow a million prompts. No one insinuated I was dumb.
Government can work well. I don't want to debate that this may not always be the case. But sometimes it is. And I wanted to say it. Thanks, USA.
20 comments:
A friend, a retired businessman, tells me he had no trouble registering for both Social Security and Medicare. The only trouble he's had was registering for the recently enacted Part D drug coverage, where he ran into the private insurers' walls of boilerplate and endless exceptions and shifting formularies. When he needed certain drugs following a recent surgery, they were not in the formulary, so he was not covered by the complex prescription drug insurance the previous administration foisted on older people. Private medical insurers are racketeers.
Yes it is horribly complicated. Trying to figure out when and what my father will have to pay for is quite impossible. He always seems to be in the donut hole and must pay for it all.
No, no, clearly the gummint can't do anything correctly ever, and so all taxes must be diverted to profit-driven private hierarchies that wiil, of course, Always to the Right Thing. Reagan gospel, and essentially that, in theory and/or in practice, of all his successors. That it clearly has no bearing on reality matters not.
With all they do, and don't do, the airlines have set themselves us in an adversarial position. I only fly with the greatest reluctance.
I too have problem with the prescription part of my medical insurance, mostly the by-mail people. If I get the drugs at the local pharmacy, it's fine but costs a lot more. If I use the insurer's mail-in service it's cheaper but error prone.
Nice to hear of that good experience with Social Security. I'll be doing that in a few months myself.
Now I hear that California is demanding yearly fees for 911 calls. Usage taxes on something this vital is scary.
Government gets a Bad Rap from the media, politicians trying to score political points, and many citizens. Yet, I've had many positive experiences with Government. No problems with the IRS over 40 years. No problem with Social Security. No problem with the DMV. And the Government workers I know are nice people and hard workers. Scapegoating the Government needs to stop.
When people complain about the government bureaucracy, I always say, "You can't run a workable governmental system for 350 million people with a couple of grade-6 file clerks and an XT computer."
I'm glad to hear that, Patti, as Jackie and I will both be filing for Social Security later this year.
Jeff M.
PS - I agree with Rick about the drug coverage. We are forced by our insurance to send away for all maintenance drugs and we've had many problems over the years - drugs don't arrive, they cut me off their lists twice, once said I didn't exist...little things like that.
It always makes me feel worse for people who don't have our "good" coverage.
No kidding,it took me no time at all to fill it out. I was astonished.
This debate over government's role doesn't seem to haunt other countries as it does us. I wonder why?
Everything in California is scary these days, and the legislature is so locked into partisanship that no Democrat will agree with any Republican and vice-versa. Any Governor - of any party - is caught between. It's a mess now and likely to get worse. When Wife retires, we're seriously thinking of leaving the state, as much as we like the climate and many other things.
Michigan is much the same. We have a Democrat as governor but she is fairly ineffective for various reasons. She likes to make the universities take the hit-and eight years of it has taken a toll. Refusing to raise taxes to get re-elected makes me wonder why I voted for Democrats.
I work in a government office as a contractor; my Beloved Spouse works in the private sector. I come home and tell her some of the dumb things that happened at work that were wasteful and showed lack of foresight. She comes home and tells me some of the dumb things that happened at work that were wasteful and showed lack of foresight. There's little difference.
I argue with a friend about health care from time to time. he doesn't want a government bureaucrat deciding what care he can get. (not that any of the proposals currently include anything like that.) My answer is that I'd rather have a government employee with no vested interest make that decision, rather than someone whose bonus may depend on how much money he doesn't authorize on care.
The Europeans have built their welfare states since the late 1800s, Patti. It's just accepted over there that Government will handle health and retirement issues. In the U.S., Government is demonized for various political strategies. Yet most Americans love Social Security, a massive Government program that will only get bigger as the Baby Boomers retire.
Your final point was a great one, Dana. I'd never thought of that before.
Well, Dana's point is a more specific version of mine. Which doesn't make it any less pointed!
Various attitudes, most highly visible in the Republican Party and too often these days in the Democratic (you have to keep those corporate donations flowing, don't we, Rep. Pelosi?) as well as somewhat (only somewhat) less hyporcitically in the Liberatarian would have the Government As Evil (or the more literate trot out Jefferson on Governing Least) line as their fall-back, since it allows for more concentration of public money into the hands of the wealthy, who After All, Know What to Do With Money (the poor just want to eat with it and such).
As George notes, the blatant class structure of most of the rest of the industrial world led to a strong trend toward social-democracy, and while that can foster a rather sad "if we can't get a grant for it, why bother" mentality, it does tend to leave fewer people starving on the streets. Till the Thatchers come along to revise to the Reagan model, at least.
And in those countries, Todd, old age, unemployment, etc, must be far less frightening and less tied to a sense of worthlessnes.
Except some of these countries are now going broke. Common currency has its downside. Where did all that money go? I guess it was all an allusion. Can't we pretend it is 1996 again and put the money back.
Those countries...and this country, too. A matter of waste, fraud, and the favoring of the wealthy and powerful, who demand favor usually with success for obvious reasons, all 'round.
Patricia, according to the WSJ, a Goldman Sachs rep in London sold the Greek government the derivatives in 2001 that went sour and now threaten not only Greece but the EU! You can see some of the story at Bloomberg.
This is such scary stuff. And they cannot devalue the entire European currency so they must cut services of get help. The entire southern part of Europe threatens to fall into the sea. Did anyone predict this when they went to a common currency. Otherwise they could devalue it.
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