Politics in FSA

 From a Government Executive piece on VA problems

“Health care is by definition an enormously specific, patient-oriented, detailed business process,” he said. “The agency itself was designed to be sealed against political influence,” he added, noting its 9,000 to 1 ratio of career to political appointees, compared with a 2,000 to 1 ratio at the Defense Department and a 500 to 1 ratio at most agencies.

In FSA when I was there: 50 SED's, 5 area directors, 4 deputies, associate, and administrator, plus maybe 5 aides--call it 65 total political. That's a 200 to 1 ratio at FSA, meaning it's more politicized than the average agency. 

Our Couch Potato Dogs

Modern Farmer reports on research that says "agility dogs" (i.e. farm dogs) do better on tests than do "companion dogs" (i.e., those dogs who spend their lives on the couch alongside their masters).  Must be why Walt Jeffries boasts of his talking dogs.

Buffett on Government, No It's Private

Brad Delong posts Warren Buffett's lessons learned:

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in government business of an unseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative.” In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the government business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced civil servants managers would automatically make rational government business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an government agency institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, government corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any government business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of government consultants peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Ode to Mud, Sweat, and Baths

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm.

" The extra protein allowed for our brains to grow swelling our heads until we thought we were masters of the Universe"

Those Were the Days--Were They?

An old man gets nostalgic reading this Life on a Colorado Farm post about haying, then and now.  But the voice of reality insists:

• I wasn't putting up beautiful alfalfa hay, but less pretty timothy/meadow grass/weeds hay, sometimes having gone through a rain or two which severely diminished its value
• it wasn't early June but likely early July, since we had to wait for the neighbor who did the baling to get his hay done first--a penalty for being a small farmer
• I didn't work on a crew of four, except for a few occasions when I hired out, but usually just with dad, perhaps my sister, and sometimes one neighbor helper
• it wasn't a beautiful blue sky on top of a Colorado mesa but a likely cloudy sky in a New York valley
• and the cut ends of the hay scratched the hell out of my forearms.

Nice how modern machinery enables an older couple (still younger than me) to continue farming but being realistic I suspect there's few to no young neighbor boys around to help--machinery means the population is thinning out in rural areas and getting old.

Would Reagan Have Made the Bergdahl Trade?

I follow the Powerline blog.  Disagree with 90+ percent of what is said, but it offers a view into the right wing.  Currently all the bloggers there are up in arms attacking the Bergdahl deal. 

I see this post reporting on a discussion tomorrow at the Reagan library.  No mention of the subject matter, but I have a suggestion:  Pro or con--would Saint Ronald have made the same decision Obama did?

One of Many Things I Don't Know

I blogged the other day about the VA.  This Kevin Drum post, reporting that the retirement migration of vets skews the supply-demand picture, overcrowding the SW facilities, shows that while my logic was okay my argument falls based on the facts.  Damn stubborn things, facts are.

Get Those Kids Off the Farm

That's the lesson of China in recent years, of the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now of Africa.

Via Chris Blattman, this is the summary of a research paper entitled: "What is driving the 'African Growth Miracle'?

We show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing and services. These declines have been more rapid in countries where the initial share of the labor force engaged in agriculture is the highest and where commodity price increases have been accompanied by improvements in the quality of governance.

In the US the improvements in machinery after the Civil War, added to the rapid immigration from Europe (including two of my grandparents), enabled us to grow.  

The VA's Problems: a Failure of Imagination?

Much in the press about the problems with the VA.  I wonder though whether the problem wasn't at bottom a failure of imagination.  What do I mean?

Create a simplistic model of the VA--call it a bathtub.

Flowing into the VA are two flows: one is the flow of old veterans turning to the VA for support.  Now we know, I assume, pretty well the demographics of this group: how many WWII vets, how many Cold War vets, how many Iraq I vets, etc.  and the rates at which each group contacts the VA and the rate at which they are approved for care.  Once approved, I assume we also know averages of how often a vet in a specific age group needs treatment/to see a doctor.  Overall, as this group ages they're probably contacting the VA more and needing treatment more, so the potential workload is increasing.  They're also dying more, so that decreases the workload.

The second flow is of course the post 9/11 vets who need care immediately as they transition from service to civilian status.  I assume that's a bit more unpredictable, and the burden on the VA for treatment is greater, because the treatment of a 22-year old with PTSD is more difficult than a 72-year old suffering from aging.


So you have two flows of demands.  How big is the bathtub receiving the flows and how big the drain?  I assume we know how many medical professionals are employed and how many vets they can give various types of treatment to. 

Now if the flows in are bigger than the flows out, the bathtub is going to fill up and at some point it's going to overflow.  If they're exactly equal then the delay in appointments is going to represent the lag time in getting the resources to respond to the flows.  If the drain is bigger than the inflow, the appointment delay is going to represent just local conditions.  (Change the bathtub to a supermarket check out line system--sometimes lines will backup briefly just because.)

Now if you have metrics covering these items you should be able to validate your appointment time statistics by looking at the rates at which people are contacting the VA (i.e., if the rate of 72-year old vets contacting the VA drops from 2000 to 2010).  If the rates drop, that means people are giving up on the VA and going private or not getting care at all.  If the rates are pretty constant, then your stats on waiting for appointments should be goo.

  I suspect what happened with the VA is they were measuring people coming in the door, without the imagination to consider the whole universe of potential VA patients. That's my take, anyway, probably wrong.

[Updated--a Vox primer on VA care.]

Moving Pigs, from a Practical Man and Powerline

Walt Jeffries has a post on animal psychology, though that's not its title.  The url for the post differs significantly from the title of the post, which might mean Walt is succumbing to political correctness.


Meanwhile, over at Powerline, a blog I usually read and rarely agree with, Mr. Hayward discusses flying pigs. (I'm ambivalent about the subject.)