Thursday, December 10, 2009

Eating Your Own Dogfood--Kid's Food

A minor theme of the health care debate over the years has been that Congress should not have better health insurance than the rest of the nation, or put another way, that Congress should live by its own standards.  (Come to think of it, that was one part of Gingrich's Contract with America with which I agreed--making a series of laws, like OSHA, apply to Congress.)

In the the IT business it used to be called eating your own dogfood: if you were working on a word processor, you ought to be using it to do your writing.

If I've followed the debate, the Senate health care bill does put the top echelon of the government, including Congress, in the new healthcare exchanges.  And now there's at least a temporary extension to food--Jane Black in the Post reports Congressional staffers are getting fed the same food USDA provides for school lunches. Too bad the law wouldn't allow a continuance--staffers are typically lowly paid and would welcome a low cost lunch every day.  There's no magic to dogfooding, but it gets people outside their usual routine and such change can generate improvements.

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