I jumped in the cab and told the driver to take me straight to hell. “Oh,” he said. “You mean LaGuardia?” He was correct, of course.
Dr. Brett M. Coldiron
It takes me just as long to get to LaGuardia from a hotel in midtown Manhattan as it does for me to fly from Cincinnati to New York. And once you are at the airport, it’s a hot mess. I hear that the terminal update at LaGuardia will be finished in 4 years. This is going to cost $8 billion, plus another $2 billion for an elevated train that connects to the railroad and subway.
Cincinnati built itself a streetcar to nowhere after the city council made a field trip to Portlandia. It was fueled by $45 million in federal “stimulus” grants, disrupted downtown for 9 years instead of 3, and cost $145 million instead of $110.
No one rides the streetcar. It is regularly delayed by people parking on the tracks, and collisions with cars happen regularly. In fact, checking to see if anyone buys a ticket was determined to not be cost effective. The city government cannot close the streetcar for 20 years because the city would otherwise have to give back the $45 million grant used to build it.
How do such boondoggles happen? It was all explained in a book given to me by a new friend in New York. “The Death of Common Sense,” by Philip K. Howard, spells it out.
If you want to fix a problem in any city you must run a gauntlet of meetings and meet regulations, many of which have nothing to do with engineering, quality, or safety. Expect action or approval to take years.
The “you can’t be too careful” movement has assumed a life of its own.
Of course, the same process is true in medicine, only more so! Human lives are at stake, so absolutely no chances can be taken. Medicine is not engineering. And the science of medicine is often so inexact that no one knows when they are taking a chance, or what is the right or wrong thing to do. The paperwork and rules become enormous. The regulations proliferate.
The resulting health care administration costs account for about 25% of health care dollars.