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I would like to think that the California Department of Motor Vehicles is persecuting me because of my comments on their terrible service here and here, but that is wishful thinking, so my sympathies to all those Californians who got a letter like I just did. It’s a bill for renewing my registration and it’s [...]
Archive for the ‘Public management’ Category
June 17th, 2011
I’ve been writing various things on this issue, following up the Illinois audit study I cited the other day. Here is one additional kibitz, cross-posted on TCF’s Taking Note. As two great philosophers have noted, it’s odd to see Republicans touting low Medicaid reimbursement rates as an argument against health reform. These arguments make little [...]
June 14th, 2011
Category: Policy Analysis, Public management
OK I am dramatizing a bit. But John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser each emailed responses to my sagely review. Richard notes the changes in PDUFA to improve post-market surveillance. He also notes the role of the new law in assisting HIV/AIDS patients. No argument there. Regarding my comments about parks, he writes: Don’t let the [...]
June 12th, 2011
Among the most perplexing problems for public managers and policymakers is the make-or-buy question. Sometimes the private sector offers useful guidance. In the past month, for example, we have seen an entertainment firm (possibly a religious cult) providing not only facility maintenance for competitors, but a lesson in good manners (good guests clean up after [...]
June 12th, 2011
Category: Policy Analysis, Public management
Public-private collaboration, for better and for worse, is the way of American government. It’s the subject of John Donahue and Richard Zeckhauser’s new book.
May 25th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Public management
Dr. Tom Frieden and a number of other CDC experts have put together an excellent public health grand rounds about the epidemic of drug overdoses in the U.S, which is driven mainly by a five fold increase in prescription drug deaths. The situation is in fact substantially worse than the official data reflect, for two [...]
May 10th, 2011
I am speaking at the U.K. Parliament next week about how to get better outcomes from addiction treatment. Like virtually all other forms of health care in the U.K. and U.S., addiction treatment is under pressure to deliver better outcomes without an increase in budget. A number of projects (such as this one) have successfully [...]
March 21st, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, Public management
Paul Krugman has a nice op-ed today about Elizabeth Warren. Among other things, he writes: Given Ms. Warren’s prescience and her role in shaping financial reform legislation — not to mention her effective performance running the Congressional panel exercising oversight over federal financial bailouts — it was only natural that she be appointed to get [...]
January 6th, 2011
Category: Public management
Several of the comments on my post about the DMV recommend privatization (or outsourcing) DMV functions, as though those described a binary choice. They do not. Every production process of a government good or service is a chain of steps (actually, a tree-like set of converging chains) beginning in the private sector (labor is always [...]
January 4th, 2011
My late August rant about my terrible experiences at the Virginia and California Department of Motor Vehicles generated comments from RBC readers, from Mark, as well as from Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias and their flocks. Some resonated with my trauma; others defended the high quality of DMVs. In light of all the comments here and [...]
