If you really want a good insight into the level of absolute, self-serving depredation that a State bureaucracy can assume,
read this link that I found at
Roberta-X's post: "Free Government Healthcare.This explains just EVERYTHING you wanted to know about California's implementation of the Chicago System which is the general outline for the Administration's plan across the nation. Since the Gerrymander of 1991 this is how the Left runs California, but it's not the Left alone, it is Leviathan Government itself - cronyism and back-patting, patronage and bag-men, California Republicans have been implicit in the same scheming, the Rape of the Public.
Repeating my own comments here: This guy is in the belly of the beast for sure, the pancreas of the Politburo at least. He shows conclusively what level of bureaucratic duplicity exists in Sacramento - and that California's woes are not just the fault of somnambulant conservatives or moonbeam air-head hippies.
* The department responsible for providing health care to this population has, according to its director, a budget of $203,000,000.
* Two hundred million dollars. Remember that number. The mental health "public trough" is huge!
* The Department of Behavioral Health Services (DBHS) currently provides services to fewer than 10,000 adults with mental illness. They spend over twenty thousand dollars per patient per year to provide mental health care. As a provider in that system, I can tell you that, for $20,000, the majority of those patients get 3 twenty-minute visits with a psychiatrist per year.
* The DBHS director says they are expecting a shortfall of "as much as" twenty million dollars this coming year. In response to that 10% cut in revenue, they are eliminating services for half the patients. That means that the new, leaner DBHS will now be spending $180,000,000 on 5,000 patients. Instead of $20,000 per patient per year, they will be spending $36,000 per patient per year.
* They have to cut services to 5,000 patients to make up for a $20,000,000 shortfall. That means that each patient they eliminate only saves the taxpayers $4,000 -- still a lot, but within range of national averages. It also means that $4,000 per patient per year is the actual incremental cost to DBHS of providing services.
It's the Apparatchiks stuffing public money in their mattresses, gaming the system and feathering their beds.
So, even with administrative bloat, it will cost DBHS $20,000,000/year to provide mental health services. Those same services end up costing the taxpayers $180,000,000/year.
It's especially revealing that he works inside such a neo-Stalinist system, and it is evident that rationing is already effectively a party of the system despite the hugely bloated purse/budget that hangs above him, controlled by literally his
Superiors - the Apparatchiks in our Sacramento Politburo. The description of his "office" is heart-wrenching, we might as well call him Dr. Winston Smith.
I park on the street and walk into a shabby building carrying two large satchels. I walk through a dingy, overcrowded waiting room filled with nervous and frustrated patients, some of whom have waited six months or more for an appointment. I have to get the attention of someone at the reception desk, behind a window, so they can push the button that will unlock the door. I walk down a narrow hall with scuffed paint and threadbare indoor-outdoor carpet. My office is dark, but the lights don't work so I have to fumble around until I get the table lamp turned on. The table lamp was brought in by the doc who uses the office when I am not there (thanks, Ted! you've saved me a third satchel). When I get the lights turned on, I behold my office. I am privileged to be able to use one of the largest offices in the facility, and it has nice windows. Truly a luxury, even though they look out on a treeless, cracked asphalt parking lot and a block wall. With the light on, I can behold the same threadbare indoor-outdoor carpet, stained by over a decade of use. I can see the smoke-blackened light fixtures that presumably once illuminated the space. I can push the bent, tattered, and non-functional mini-blinds back into place. Now it's time to open the satchels.
The description of his office is
also pretty good description of many schools in California, as the system that ru(i)ns and "finances" them is xerographically similar, where money goes in a the top and is skimmed before it reaches teachers or pupils - and the craven Teacher's Union get's its cut while crying "Foul!" the whole time and also skimming the wages of its newby practitioners for political purposes.
Really what he's saying and showing is that the "Public Trough" is not really for the public - it is provided
by the Public, but that *Some Publis* are much more equally compensated that other mere public actors. The rape of the state continues from above.
And if you delusionally think Government is capable of being in
any way streamlined I have several bridges to sell you, and a couple pyramids in Egypt.
I bring my own laptop and pray that it doesn't sprout legs. I connect my own wireless networking equipment to the antique printer and the 10baseT LAN so that I can access the software I developed at my own expense (hundreds of thousands of dollars) to help keep the County's paperwork burden from eating in to the precious few minutes I'm given to actually spend with each patient. I get out my t-shirt for when the office temperature gets over 90 degrees and the sweater and jacket for when it dips below 60 degrees. These temperature variations are independent of the season or the temperature outdoors. Portable heater, you say? That's what caused the fire that took out the light fixtures.
Did I mention the smell? The bathrooms?
The overburdened clerical staff struggles to find bloated charts crammed into a minuscule file room. They try to keep track of my appointments on a computer system that would have been pathetic even back in the 1980's. They try calling me on my phone when a patient arrives, but my phone only works about a third of the time.
I am paid a good salary, but it's only about half of what I get paid when I do the same work in private-sector jobs (with better smelling offices). Like everyone there, I do the work because the patients are so wonderful and so deserving of humane care.
This is why California is in financial ruin, and what you can expect from a Federal Administration that has similar plans Nationally.
