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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.