Cross-posted from And The Horse You Rode In On
So you misplaced your tax records. Then you lost your return. The IRS sent you a letter, and you lost that. Keep it up, and guess where you’ll be spending your days. It’s your own dumb fault.
But turn it around. You’re a Texas bureaucrat in health and welfare. A mother files forms to renew treatment for her son with kidney cancer. You lose the paperwork. She files it again. She calls repeatedly. She faxes new copies of the "missing" documents. You misfile those. The boy’s eligibility expires. The treatment stops, and he dies.
So what happens to you, the homicidal bureaucrat? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, except that you might get a promotion or a bonus. After all, in Texas and elsewhere, there’s an ongoing campaign to undermine programs that deliver healthcare to poor and working class kids.
The incident is told by Bob Herbert in the New York Times(May 19 Op-Ed). But the story is repeated across the country, and no bureaucrat or legislator has been charged with murder.
Why not? Because when you screw up, it’s your fault, and you’d better fix it – or else. And when they screw up, it’s also your fault, and somehow you have to fix it even though they may screw up again and again until it’s too late.
Here’s what the law should say. If there is administrative confusion about an application or a claim, the claim should automatically and immediately be approved by default until the problem is resolved.
Just as you are (supposedly) innocent until proven guilty, you should be eligible until proven ineligible.
Until we get such laws – holding the perpetrators, not the victims, responsible – then bureaucrats are getting away with negligent homicide or second degree murder and other crimes of commission and omission. They should be called to account, and so should the legislators who for ideological or political reasons pressure the apparatchniks to kill and injure the people they are sworn to serve.