Lack of incentive at heart of VA scandal
We are currently bemoaning the VA scandal of the neglect and poor treatment of our nation's finest. The scope and size of this pathetic and insensitive negligence grows almost daily.
With all the respect I can retrieve for the government worker jungle, government unions and bureaucratic labyrinths, which for me is almost non-existent, there is one critical ingredient that does not seem to exist when the people's money is being spent. That critical ingredient is incentive. As far as one can see, within the governmental world it is a non-existent factor.
Ideas, innovation and efficiency are critical to the life of a private business. The incentive to operate the business in such a way that a profit is achieved is a very real factor for the business owner or owners. No such incentive hangs so ominously over the head of a government department director.
When Congress gives him or her the money to operate the department, no caveat to spend the money wisely or efficiently accompanies those funds.
A doctor in private practice knows that the income of his practice must cover his expenses. So he sees 10 patients per hour. The VA doctor gets his check each month, whether he sees one, three or five patients each hour. And this is the same for all the workers in a VA facility. The amount of services rendered does not affect their paycheck amount. The critical factor of incentive is missing.
This missing factor has been around for a long time in the spending of the people's money in the government world. The VA has been inefficient for many years. It was only after the influx of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were crowded into the molasses-like flow of the VA treatment pipeline, and our finest began to die while oozing through this constrained conduit that the situation reared its pathetic head.
In the real world of corporations, bonuses are given for achievements beyond those expected for normal job performance. In the government world, bonuses are paid just for showing up at work.
The incentive to innovate to increase production with the same amount of effort, the incentive to employ ideas to increase the efficiency of the work being done should be the source of bonuses, not just being on the job eight hours a day.
Unions, probably even more so, governmental employee unions, tend to resist, almost vehemently, movements toward more incentivizing in the workplace. They see a department that once had 50 employees now reduced to 40 because of the increase in efficiency. This, to them, is seen as losing 10 union members, not getting the job done with less expense.
They also see the workers being made to work harder than they should have to, to turn out 10 widgets per hour rather than eight per hour.
They rarely pick up on the fact that the improved method of manufacture or the better tool increased the production to 10 widgets, and not the worker slaving harder. And the worker who came up with the idea for the improved method or the better tool should receive the bonus, not those who just showed up for work each day.
That would be a form of this critical commodity called incentive. It is rare in our bloated governmental bureaucracy and another reason we are receiving so little from our government, spending more than ever before, and falling ever more deeply into the chasm of national bankruptcy.
Ray E. Hall writes from
Lake Martin.
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