in bureaucratic hell

[calimac]

I've just spent two and a half hours on the phone with Medicare representatives, trying to straighten out a problem with my late mother's claims.  That's on top of the hour I spent yesterday on the same thing.

Am I ready to disavow my liberal faith in government and let the lean and mean private sector take over our business?  Absolutely not, and here's why.

1) Most of these people were actually trying to be helpful, even if they didn't know anything, and went beyond the call of duty in trying to get me information.  Especially the last one, who was in the wrong department, but who listened when I explained that hers was the only department I could reach, and who really went the extra mile by contacting the right department (unreachable by outside phone) and getting a definitive answer, and chatting agreeably as we waited.

2) These departments that I was communicating with were those of a private contractor, not the government in the strict sense.  And I reached them because I was given the number by a volunteer assistance program whose representatives also took a little extra effort to help.

3) All around, it was far less frustrating than the oceans of time I spent waiting on hold and being shuttled back and forth to the same numbers that had previously been unable to help me, and being assured that something was done when it was not done, and being told I should have asked the previous person to do something they'd told me they could not do, that I had trying to set up AT&T internet service a few years ago.  In this case today, when I reported that someone else could not help me, I was listened to, and something else was tried.

Winston Churchill once said (quoting an old proverb, or so he claimed) that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others.  So I can say that government bureaucracies are the worst bureaucracies in the world, except for all the corporate ones.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It appears that we agree slightly more than I had grasped, which is a good thing. I'm not sure if you noticed that my comments on choice between corporations included the statement that I don't think there is as much competition between them as I would like, in many cases. Perhaps we would both like to see markets that are genuinely competitive, and government agencies that are doing jobs essential to government and are not expected to be competitively organized (I recall, for example, a passage by Ayn Rand that denounces the idea of competing police forces as demonstrating a failure to understand the essential nature of government), even if we differ drastically on the range of functions that are essentially governmental.

To go further than this we would have to talk about things like the economic history of the twentieth century and the political economy of large corporations, which would get lengthy. I feel that I have already intruded too much on your post, and will not impose on you further.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I posted because I see too many people who are outside of that range. There are many, too many, people who would use a tiring experience with government bureaucracy as an excuse to decry government entire; some of them even cite a bad past experience as what opened their eyes to the evils of government.

But they never say the equivalent about equally annoying experiences with corporate bureaucracies. Strange.