Contributors

Friday, December 27, 2013

Can't Private Industry Get Anything Right?

A couple of weeks ago Target's point of sale terminals were attacked by hackers, who stole the credit card and PIN numbers of as many as 40 million customers. Target isn't the only company to have this problem; earlier this month JPMorgan Chase admitted half a million card users' data were stolen. That was more than two months after they found out, and that was two months after it happened. The same thing happened to Sony in 2011.

People who ordered gifts weeks before Christmas were disappointed when both UPS and FedEx failed to deliver on the promised dates:
Mr. Yslas said that he ordered the gift from Chef Uniforms early in the month, and that it was shipped on Dec. 14, with an estimated delivery of Dec. 19. But on Dec. 19, U.P.S. changed the estimated delivery date to Dec. 23. The package arrived in Fort Worth on Dec. 22, and U.P.S. changed the estimated arrival to Dec. 24. On Dec. 23, U.P.S. pushed that to Dec. 26. Mr. Yslas said he had complained to U.P.S.
(Meanwhile, the US Post Office began making Sunday deliveries for Amazon.com.)

Yesterday Delta Airlines' website was so screwed up that thousands of people were getting round-trip tickets to Hawaii for eighty-six bucks.

Curiously, the folks who have been complaining about how the healthcare.gov website problems prove that government can't get anything right are silent about these private industry screwups.

They also forget that a private company, CGI group of Montreal, is behind the healthcare.gov website. The company's mistakes have not been limited to the federal website; they also did the work on the Massachusetts and Vermont health care websites. Those states are withholding payment from CGI Group because of numerous problems.

There's nothing intrinsically different between government and corporate bureaucracies. They're all run by human beings who make the same kinds of mistakes for the same reasons. The main difference is that we control government through the power of the ballot, while private industry can keep their dirty little secrets behind closed doors as long as they can buy off or threaten people into silence with lawsuits. So while it may seem government is less competent than private industry, the fact is that private industry is simply better at keeping secrets: just ask the NSA.

Some people seem to think that the healthcare foul-up is due to rank government incompetence, while data breaches are concentrated attacks committed by brilliant hackers. Target isn't saying how that credit card data was stolen, but most data breaches are due to rank incompetence: someone puts an unencrypted file on a web server and forgets it there, or loses a laptop with thousands of medical records, or doesn't upgrade to the latest version of the operating system, or visits a porn site and gets infected with malware that steals their password, and so on.

Ultimately, the health care website is just a front-end that allows consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons between equivalent health insurance plans offered by private industry. That's all it is.

To sell it the president just needs to (using a word that's so popular with Republicans these days) "rebrand" it with buzzwords conservatives like: the new health care system is a public-private partnership that sets up a marketplace where standards-based insurance plans engage in healthy competition, allowing consumer choice. As with charter schools, some consumers get vouchers to help pay for private industry health plans. The system encourages personal responsibility and prevents freeloaders and takers from dragging the whole system down.

Oh, and if he cussed out some teachers, called a few women sluts, slammed the work ethic of blacks, and insulted the intelligence of Latinos that would seal the deal.

1 comment:

GuardDuck said...

Of course I can decide not to use a private industry's services. I'm not able to opt-out from government.