Redundancy and Waste

While the news has been filled with Obama care troubles and the NSA spying on our friends, one subject has seemingly disappeared from the stage, The budget and debt ceiling. A couple of weeks ago you didn't hear much else, yet now it seems to have vanished.


Just in case anyone has forgotten we get to go to the edge of the cliff again in the middle of January and already both sides are suggesting that they aren't going to get much done before then. Lest you have forgotten here is the simplified crux of the problem.


Democrats are unwilling to cut any programs and want to raise taxes. Republicans are refusing to raise any more taxes with out the cuts and the tea party wants Obama care defunded before they will budge on anything. This of course leads to nothing being accomplished.


There are some things that could be done though that might actually work, if we could find any real leadership that is. The first would be ending all the pork projects that get attached to bills, which have nothing to do with running the government and only politically help the person who attached the bill. A fine example was Mitch McConnell being able to get some extra funding for a bridge project in his home state as a way to get him to go along with Harry Reid temporary budget plan and push the battle again down the road.


The second would be getting rid of all the wasteful government run redundancy. I saw a small part of in a visit to a VA hospital in Boston for a simple consult...


When my wife and I arrived we had no idea of where to go but once we did we made a bee line for the desk that was clearly marked “clinic check in.” After waiting for the others that were ahead of me the lady took my card and swiped it through her swiper, for a lack of another term, and then informed me that I had to go to a different desk on the other side of that same area to check in. So off we headed to the other desk. Upon our arrival at that desk there was a gentleman standing there who was looking just a bit on the ticked off side while a woman sat at another desk on a computer. After about 5 minutes of standing there the lady at the computer turned around and informed us that there was no one there to check us in, the woman who does that had just stepped out and she had no idea when said woman would be back and she wasn't able to check us in so we should go to the other desk,the first one that we had been to,and have her check us in. By this time there was about 8 of us standing there waiting to get checked in and all of us told her that they had just sent us here from the desk she was trying to send us back to. She muttered something about “well you should sit down and wait because I don't know how long it's going to be.” Now gentle readers I am not a brain surgeon and I admit that I don't understand all the intricacies of running a government agency, but where I normally go we check ourselves in via a kiosk. If I can do it, with nothing more then a high school education, surely a government employee sitting right there should be able to. Also understand there were multiple “check in desks”all within 50 feet of each other. Not a single one could check us in. The lady sitting there was clearly capable of cruising through Facebook and her personal emails, her screen was facing us so we could see what she was doing, but she was not competent enough to swipe a card and putting a check mark next to our names on the paper.


After about another15 minutes the lady who did know how to swipe a card and check us in finally arrived. The other lady,as it turned out, was a nurse who's sole purpose was to take our vital signs. She also turned out to be the next person I had to see. Once I got to her she told me to stand there and wait ,quite rudely I might add, while she finished what she was doing on the computer. And what was she doing that was of such vital government mandated importance? She was writing an email on her Yahoo account. So I stood there for another 10 minutes while she hunted and pecked her way across the keyboard. To say that I was angry would be a massive understatement.


Finally I was checked in. I was an hour late for my appointment, but I was finally checked in. Twenty minutes later we were ushered into an examination room. The short version is that apparently the doctor never looked at my records. I spent an hour having another examination ,that I had already had,that was in fact the reason that I was there in the first place. Redundancy and stupidity combined. What was supposed to be a simple consult turned into a 4 hour marathon over something that shouldn't have taken more then a half hour.


Here is my point. If the nurse, or any of the other check in spots, had checked us in, they are all on the same system after all, they could have saved us all time and moved on to other vets who needed help. Better yet they could simplify by having one desk with say three people ,who all know how to swipe a card and check us in, thus saving time and money in wasted salaries.
Second if the doctors would actually take a minute to read the files of the veterans before they talk to them, then they would save a lot of time by not doing the same exams over and over (I had the same test and exam 3 times in the last 3 weeks) and they could move more quickly on to other Veterans.


Remember this was just one small area of this particular VA, if I saw the redundancy and wasted time there, just imagine how much of it goes on all over the VA system not to mention the rest of the government.


Just keep I mind,as we approach yet another cliff, that there is a lot of money that could be saved just by taking care of these two things that I have mentioned ,and I am sure that there is more that could be added to the list, but I suspect it will be those of us who are veterans,seniors or poor, that once again will be the targets because , after all, we are such leeches to society.


Just my Simple Minded Opinion.