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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

> It is a purposeful safeguard against autocracy and more pedestrian corruption

I get how inefficiency is a safeguard against autocracy. But how is it a safeguard against pedestrian corruption? Seems like inefficiency is a perfect cover to spin up a 501(c)3, bid on some social contracts and underdeliver. In our city, an audit was performed and homeless services contracts underdelivered by at least 60%. There's good evidence that medicare fraud nationwide is rampant.

How do you combat a culture where people can scam the government under the cover of inefficiency?

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Let’s take a super trivial example: required competitive bidding for contracts

When a business finds a vendor they’re happy with and trust, they just keep going with that vendor.

For a government official, “vendor I’m happy with and trust” can be either an excellent, efficient vendor — or the official’s cousin. So we require bidding processes for almost everything. This process is a cost, risk, and delay that gets baked into the “cost of doing [government]” at every level. And yeah, it does open up new avenues of corruption and maladaptation (for example vendors getting better at navigating the bidding processes than they are at delivering outcomes), but that’s the tradeoff that we (and most democratic) governments make.

Medicare fraud is often portrayed as beneficiaries defrauding the government. In reality nearly all of it is committed by healthcare organizations, and the vast majority of it is committed by the mega pay-viders like UnitedHealthGroup.

That has nothing to do with bureaucracy and everything to do with private money in politics.

Step 1 is maybe ban the scammers from government, and don't vote for parties that elevate them to the national level?

See: Rick_Scott

https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386....

"LARGEST HEALTH CARE FRAUD CASE IN U.S. HISTORY SETTLED HCA INVESTIGATION NETS RECORD TOTAL OF $1.7 BILLION"

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