Finally!  1 July 2013, is finally here!  Those of you who work for the Federal government might want to,  for planning purposes,  take note.  I retired 8 months and 2 days ago and today I receive my first retirement check.  There were no errors in the package, no documents missing, no clarification required on any forms.  AFPC (Air Force Personnel Center) executed their part of the process flawlessly.  But, once my package reached OPM (Office of Personnel Management) it was as if I ceased to exist.  A file in an “In” basket waiting for the bureaucracy to decide it was my turn.

When I retired I was told that I could expect to wait 3-6 months for the process to be complete. (How many of you, getting close to retirement, have saved up 6 months of living expenses!?)  When, after 4 months, I was finally able to actually speak to a human at OPM I was told that the waiting period was actually 6-12 months. (How many of you, getting close to retirement, have saved up 12 months of living expenses!?)  That’s when I decided it was time to be the squeaky wheel.

I called and I emailed.  I spent hours on hold.  They promised that they would answer emails in “just 20 working days”.  20 working days?  That’s a month!  To answer an email?  I repeatedly got scripted responses and it soon became obvious that their goal was to simply put me off for another month.  Just keep kicking the can down the road by giving me a nugget of hope that it was almost done.  I was very close to calling in some favors from two congressmen and two senators but I really wanted to see how long it would actually take and, besides, I know how easily bureaucracies can deflect and delay congressional inquiries.

So what’s the point?  Am I whining, or just boring ya’ll by venting?  Maybe a little of both.  But the real point is this.  This is a process that has been in place for decades.  People retire every day.  There’s nothing new.  So why doesn’t the process work?  Thomas Sowell once said, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong”.  Sadly, when a bureaucracy fails, no one gets fired.  It simply gives the bureaucrats ammunition to ask for more money to “improve”  the process and enlarge their empire.  And it’s the same at all levels.  Remember the last time your school district, or city, or county had a fiscal crisis because they overspent on frivolous programs or bloated staffs?  Did they try to manage your money better, streamline, or get more efficient?  No, they told the community that they would lay off police, firemen, teachers and eliminate essential infrastructure repairs unless they got a tax increase.  Pathetically, a significant percentage of the electorate actually believe it.

So, let’s put on our logic thinking caps.  How can it be possible to reduce the cost of something like healthcare by adding an enormous new bureaucracy on top of the costs of hospitals and doctors and medications?  How can we get better care when decisions about your health aren’t made between you and your doctor but by an unaccountable bureaucrat who just sees you as another file in his in box?  It is, of course, not possible.  The bureaucracy will simply grow and grow and grow and demand an ever increasing budget so that it can fix the problems it has created.  Can you afford to wait for a bureaucrat to decide if you should live or die?

My retirement is just money.  I anticipated the failures of the system because I’ve seen how the system hasn’t work for the last 35 years, but I don’t think any of us are ready for the inevitable results of the destruction of the best healthcare system in the world.  As my friend Dr. Dave always said, “Getting old is not for the faint of heart”.