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Canada's Top Mountie Issues Blistering Memo On IT Failures (www.cbc.ca)
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson has levelled a blistering memo obtained by the CBC on how critical IT failures have increased by 129 per cent since Shared Services Canada took over tech support for the entire government five years ago. Not only that, the memo says, the duration of each outage has increased by 98 per cent. "Its 'one size fits all' IT shared services model has negatively impacted police operations, public and officer safety and the integrity of the criminal justice system," reads the memo. A list of specific incidents includes an 11-hour network computer outage on Jan. 18 that downed every Mountie's BlackBerry, affected dispatching, and prevented the RCMP and 240 other police forces from accessing the Canadian Police Information Centre database.
During those 11 hours, 3 jaywalkers, 4 litterers and 1 bicycle thief got away. But, they later came back and apologized.
You should not confuse who pays with who delivers.
Single payer in Canada costs about half as much than multiple payer healthcare in the US, while yielding better overall outcomes.
The problem described here is single delivery organization. The larger the organization, the more slow, bureaucratic and inefficient it
becomes. The only thing that scales up is purchasing power (hence the appeal of single payer healthcare). The right thing to do is usually
single payer but multiple doer.
For example, consolidating IT across the Canadian Federal government has not worked out well. Similarly, replacing independently run hospitals with provincial health authorities has not been a good experience. That does not argue against single payer, it argues for operational decisions to be made closer to the front lines.
Having witnessed the creation of a centralized IT system close up, I have seen just how disastrous, and ultimately how expensive the results can be. I think the logic behind unifying infrastructure is seductive, but rarely does anyone honestly assess the massive costs, because if they did, no government would ever pay for it. So you put together an upgrade plan that has an absurdly low pricetag, knowing full well that by the time the job is actually done (if it is ever completed), the costs will be orders of a magnitude greater. The critical step to this "unlimited budget via the back door" is to bring the new system up, regardless of how far away from actual completion and stability it is, then immediately shut down the old systems, shred the hard drives and dispose of the hardware, so that no one can ever contemplate returning to the old system as a standby. This is critical. You have to make the cost of retreating back over the proverbial Rubicon so great that you end up being stuck with the new system, and thus with the costs of making it work.
To my mind, the more logical way to approach this is to create a centralized RDBMS, make sure that all the disparate systems at least can regularly vomit out a batch job in one common format, and dump it to the RDBMS. Over time you could conceivably use this new database as a the core of replacement systems, or not , as you choose. I've worked on this kind of system before, puking out batch exports from one system, throwing it into another database and then processing, reporting or whatever it is you want to do, and then pushing changes back up to the systems. It was all done with common shared import/export formats. Now admittedly this does mean having to write code for each system, but that is almost invariably a fraction of the workload of building an entire replacement system and then spending years of ever-inflating budgets, downtime, and in the case of a police force, possibly even risking lives.
But companies like Deloitte, IBM and HP have basically made selling "unified solutions" that inevitably turn into IT catastrophes a vast cash cow, and so long as they can con bureaucrats and politicians into buying into their bullshit, they'll keep making money hand over fist even as the products they roll out remain utter shit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It should be noted that the rich love single payer systems, because it makes them feel good.
Ah yes! That explains all those rich Republicans I've seen at the poll queues, just lining up to support single-payer healthcare in the U.S.
Breakfast served all day!
Citation that isn't behind a paywall needed...
And on top of that, you sound like an angry American who took the astroturf hook, line and sinker.
Signed, a Canadian who is quite happy with his single payer healthcare.
The real story here is that Shared Services was set up to fail almost from the beginning. While the idea of centralized IT is probably a good one from a reducing-duplication standpoint (at the expense of an increasing-bureaucracy standpoint); Shared Services Canada's budget was cut before it was even half-formed, and then cut again in subsequent years (see this November 2016 Ottawa Citizen article: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/...). So of course they are failing to deliver. So while it may be fun to say "Feds Screw Up IT Again, Hurr Durr" let's be sure to blame the real problem makers -- the politicians, mostly Conservative, who dug this hole that Shared Services finds itself in.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I've seen centralized IT work far better than decentralized. It comes down to execution.
After working in Canada IT for several years, I can place the blame squarely on culture. IT is considered below the janitor socially, underfunded, run Command-Control by politically driven management... and those are the good things. It goes downhill from there.
There's border crossing for medical treatment, but it's not the Canadians doing it....
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/fact-checking-trump-are-canadians-swarming-the-border-to-get-better-healthcare
However, these lengthy wait times don't actually translate to a mass migration of patients popping across the border for surgery or specialist appointments. Though some of Canada's wealthiest patients may choose to do this rather than wait, they represent fewer than half a percent.... Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control estimates 750,000 Americans travel outside the country for medical treatments each year.
Neither I or anyone I know has ever gone to the US for a medical procedure. We get US TV up here and to be frank watching commercials where American hospitals advertise for customers fills us with horror. To us it's a service. That'd be like you watching commercials for different police forces to call when your house is being invaded.
> I notice that you aren't even posting any links. Nice to have blind faith but I prefer facts.
What "link" do you want? My medical records? Or polls? Here's one:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/8056/healthcare-system-ratings-us-great-britain-canada.aspx
In that one, 6% of US respondants were very happy with their care, and 44% very dissatisfied, compared to 16% of Canadians very happy and 17% very dissatisfied. On the surface I'd say that pretty much torpedoed what few points you had.
But hey, you want more? Fill your boots:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canadians-differ-from-trump-on-health-care-poll-shows/article32835912/
And I know anecdotes aren't data, etc etc. but here's a Reddit forum asking Canadians what they think of their healthcare vs the US system with some answers from people who have experienced both:
https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/5onhfb/are_you_happy_with_your_healthcare/
And here's a story I read a few years ago about another American convert to Canada which really kind of shocked me as to how shitty the US system is if you're not loaded:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/permissiontolive/2012/07/how-i-lost-my-fear-of-universal-health-care.html
"When I asked for prayers for my little brother who had been burned in an accident, they were all puzzled why the story did not include immediately rushing him to the hospital. When they asked me to clarify and I explained that many people in the States are not insured and they try to put off medical care unless absolutely needed, they literally could not comprehend such a thing."
Seriously? This is the sort of system you think is way better than going to a hospital for $0 and getting looked at?
Another anecdotal thing I've noticed is in Canada when someone says they were in a car accident, the first thing many say is "Oh! Are you all right?!" In the States among friends and coworkers a story like that gets a response of "Ohmygod! Did you sue?" Which initially struck me as money hungry until I realized that in many cases if you *don't* sue you can be financially ruined by a simple ambulance ride and a broken bone.
Another one off story: http://www.fark.com/comments/9485906/soosh-farker-who-hosts-Livingston-Stapler-Company-Presents-radio-show-was-moved-to-Queen-Anne-Medical-Center-in-Seattle-for-rehab-on-February-15th-LGT-thread-from-earlier-this-week-Updates-in-thread
Saw that the other day. Long story short, guy in Alaska is internet-famous on Fark.com for hosting some obscure radio show on the weekend. Bad road conditions caused him to wreck and he had to be air evaced to a large hospital. Bill is $200K. He has insurance but it only covers 80%. Him and his wife are kind of screwed financially now. In Canada, you know what they would have paid for ? Parking at the hospital. Maybe $20 a day. Oh, and snacks from the vending machine.