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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

My complaint is with 'government-run businesses', which will always have such issues. It stems from not being responsible for efficiency or profitability.

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I mean, honestly, yeah? I'd rather not my roads focus on being profitable. I'd really prefer the opposite of my police force focusing on being profitable. I'd really start freaking out if my voting system(the actual counting of votes) focused on turning a profit, and probably take to streets if my public schools were trying to profit off my children.

Efficiency, sure, what's inefficient about the USPS? I sent a package over my lunch break today, and my package delivery is 10x better delivered by a USPS mailperson than someone hired by amazon. (A USPS mailperson leaves a package at my door, but I've had packages from amazon thrown into my bushes, or dropped beside the street)

Yeah but a website/accounting function? It should be accurate, efficient and legal. Which our tax office is sometimes seen as not-those-things.

And this whole thread is how TurboTax lobbied to make it inaccurate, inefficient, and no doubt have tried to make it illegal.

But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.

This is a strawman argument. Being "government run" does not automatically equate to being irresponsible or inefficient. Your complaint holds no water: Social Security and Medicare are incredibly efficient programs for their scale, and both wildly popular with their participants (per Pew Research as well as direct survey data from SSA and HHS). If they can achieve such results, why would other large orgs such as the IRS not? Rhetorical of course! They can, with proper political and logistical support (as has been seen with USDS/18F executing at the IRS, DHS, and VA).

I don’t know about social security but the claim that Medicare is more efficient than private insurers is not correct. It only appears to be so due to accounting procedures that do not expense services from other govt agencies on Medicare’s pnl. So for example, a different department of the government handles billing, all the costs therein are not included in Medicare’s bottom line, thus inflating its efficiency.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep... (Comparing administrative costs for private insurance and Medicare)

Medicare is still more efficient than private insurance, even allowing for Social Security handling a lot of the administration you mention. Social Security must exist, and must provide the services it does, so you would of course rely on their infra if you're Medicare.

So the government is incredibly inefficient at everything... except health insurance?

Those weren't my words at all.

it is telling that the only way you seem to judge entities is through the lens of efficiency and profitability on a short term basis.

could you please share your thoughts about internet access in the US of A? it seems that despite the best efforts of Saint Market, long may he reign, and all of this wonderful competition and efficient allocation of resources and so forth optimizing for short term outcomes has led to mediocre speeds and monopoly-ish behavior/choice in most areas.

or that Saint Market has led to pretty poor health outcomes in the USA despite spending massively amount more per capita than other nations

or that Saint Market's desire for profitability and efficiency leads them to, say, not replace lead pipes which ruin health of various communities (probably far away from yours, so it's OK .... for now)

it's almost like evaluating things based on extremely myopic criteria that people use to judge for-profit companies leads to outcomes that optimize for local maxima but are horrible when viewed from even slightly more far out, like, i dunno, a few years.

can you acknowledge that some things are best evaluated on performance outside of "profitability" and "efficiency" in the time span of 3 months?

Ok, how about cost overruns, administrative costs, technology upgrades and on and on? Its only as regards these things, that I regard profitability to be an important pressure.

Management responsible to the bottom line will sometimes improve those things. Management responsible to … I don't know what a government agency is responsible to? rarely upgrades, review, improves. It is axiomatic of government agencies that they exist for their own sake. And cost a bucketload of (our) money.

Why is profitability important for a government-run entity?

Because we pay for it. So it should be run without egregious cost overruns, huge administration costs and old technology.

That sounds like breaking even, not profiting?

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