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