As I filled my second cup of coffee and began reading the Sunday Palm Beach Post this morning, I stumbled upon two widely disparate items that bore a subtle, yet remarkable resemblance to one another. The first, an op-ed by Paul Krugman published in the New York Times a day earlier, noted a congressional rebuke of the government’s proposal to influence health care costs through an Independent Payment Advisory Board. He also took issue with the manner in which medical patients are now blithely referred to as health care “consumers” – as if receiving medical care “…were no different from (any other) commercial transaction” – buying a car, for example. In his opinion piece (“Patients are not Consumers”), Krugman bemoans our dehumanizing societal valuation shift in which citizens and doctors (aka providers) have been reduced to mere market factors. Thus, it’s only natural to utilize related free market language in referring to other provider and consumer matters – such as maximizing “consumer choice.” So, patients (aka consumers) would be free to choose without bureaucratic interference - even in the absence of the highly specialized knowledge needed for intelligent decision-making involving billions of taxpayer dollars.
Later, as I neared the bottom of my mug and made it to the “Accent” section of the paper, I was struck by Sam Thielman’s book review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King – an unfinished, hard-to-read work that explores the boring professional lives of US Internal Revenue Service agents. Like I said, at first blush these two pieces seemed to have had little in common. Yet, Thielman discovers that Wallace succeeded in presenting “…IRS agents – soulless bureaucrats in the mind of the American taxpayer – as not merely souled, but complexly so.” Yes, somehow the author allows the reader to peer into the lives of several otherwise faceless bureaucrats working together in Illinois 30 years or so ago and discover their common humanity.
True, it’s rare to find coverage in one’s morning newspaper that extols (or even implies) the humanity of public servants – unless we’re talking about such human foibles as corruption, shoddy ethics, failure to oversee government contractor performance in the Gulf of Mexico and the like. But honestly, my takeaway from roughly 45 years’ involvement in public management – as a rank-and-file public servant, senior executive and management consultant both in the US and abroad – is that, in the main, my colleagues and counterparts were at least as dedicated, principled and trustworthy as any other professional segment of our society. Look for this un-cola side of government workers as the country celebrates Public Service Recognition Week in early May.
Warren Master
President & Editor-at-Large, The Public Manager
