TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
What are the odds that if and when she does have a baby she won't vaccinate it?
Face, meet leopard. Leopard, meet face.
- Thread starter TellyKNeasuss
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Reformed Offlian
Master Poster
Yeah, I think that, in looking at campaign promises and whether or to they get kept, it becomes important to distinguish between: "legitimate aspirations that he ultimately failed to deliver" and: "empty stuff he just said to get people to vote for him." They represent different sorts of failure, and call for differentiated critique.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
There's a lot of spin involved here. The request wasn't specifically to stop spending, it's to reduce the number of individual people authorized to spend. Which isn't a bad idea, and it's pretty common throughout every other industry. Especially when there's financial stresses involved for the company. Last year, my company took corporate cards away from many people, because there was just too much spending without any reasonable oversight involved. Now, corporate cards are only available to a limited set of people unless a special request is made. All of our purchase orders have to go through a centralized group of 4 people for approval before we can set up invoices of any sort, and if they're for large amounts they have to go up through the CFO for approval.The Regime cuts off funding for VA P-cards, which will cause severe damage or death to veterans in care.
VA gets GSA request to slash total number of employees who hold purchase cards
GSA has asked 15 other agency heads “to reduce their agency charge card limits, and the number and usage of cards.”federalnewsnetwork.com
Yeah, it's a pain, yeah it's going to be difficult for the VA to adapt... but on the other hand, it seems egregious that 1 in 50 employees of VA have the ability to spend large amounts of money with no notable approval process too.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
There's an EO issued focused around making IVF an essential health benefit with very limited costs.
Which, by the way, is a really bad idea.
I appreciate you guys are just venting but don't forget that these are eugenic sentiments. I probably wouldn't have brought it up but Shemp making a boo Hitler post RIGHT after a 'haha eugenics are appropriate in THIS case' post kinda. Threw me.
Reformed Offlian
Master Poster
Yes, it was. I suspect you just looked at the headline and didn't read the report. All cards were to limit their spending to $1. And the memo only allowed the possibility for removing that limit on a very small minority of cards. How is this anything other than a measure intended to stop spending?
If the intent were to review who does and does not hold a card, where are the provisions that would accomplish this? Spin indeed!
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Segnosaur
Penultimate Amazing
I see it less of a "eugenics" sentiment, and more of a "Darwin Awards" sentiment.
(In case you hadn't heard of them, the "darwin awards" refer to dark-humor stories about people who have died through dumb actions of their own, or have otherwise been rendered incapable of having children.)
After all, we didn't say "she should be sterilized" (or in this case specifically denied treatment). Instead, she picked a course of action that would likely result in her being less likely to have children on her own volition (i.e. picking the candidate who was more likely to mess up her life than to help her reproduce.)
Safe-Keeper
My avatar is not a Drumpf hat
Stop the pearl clutching.
johnny karate
... and your little dog too.
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Yes, eugenics programs have always famously been about nothing more than people on the internet hoping that stupid people don't reproduce. Well argued.
TellyKNeasuss
Illuminator
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My recollection is that the number of cardholders will be reduced to around 500. If this is correct, it means that there will only be around 500 people who can order supplies. This is for all the VA hospitals and clinics. And since hospitals, and some clinics, run 24/7 operations and many other clinics are open more than 8-5 Monday thru Friday, the probability that a hospital or clinic will need an emergency supply order and have no one available with a card to pay for the order is pretty high.
Norman Alexander
Penultimate Amazing
And if they can reduce it to just 500, why not just one. Save even more money.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I bit my tongue on this one, but my thoughts went to the exact same place.I take it more from the perspective of having kids isn't a right, it's an option. So while I totally support IVF existing as a technology, I don't really support it being paid for by other people whether that's taxpayers or other policyholders. The IVF process is expensive all on it's own, not counting the hormones and stuff that goes with it, on average it takes 3 to 4 rounds before successful implantation occurs, and when it does it increases the likelihood of multiple births and premature births. IVF pregnancies are consider high risk pregnancies, with an elevated likelihood of a NICU stay.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
The very first paragraph, emphasis mine:
Dropping the limit on almost all cards with some few exceptions can be done very quickly and efficiently, and also allows for that limit to be raised upon evaluation. It's arguably a better approach than revoking all the cards and then having to issue new ones in the future.
TellyKNeasuss
Illuminator
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The actual number is 479 (0.1% of the total number of employees). To have someone in a hospital who can order supplies 24/7 requires having 5 cardholders (because of vacations and holidays). The VA runs 170 hospitals, so it requires 850 cardholders just for the hospitals.
Thermal
August Member
Is the concern here that workers are buying themselves stuff on the cards? Cuz otherwise I'm not seeing any huge difference in less cardholders, except that those few cardholders now have to dedicate more time to making purchases, instead of doing other aspects of their jobs.
Like, it might make sense to have a bunch of people using a half hour of their day buying the stuff that needs to be bought for their division, rather than one spending all day buying for everyone. The end result of purchased materials should be the same, and be verified anyway, in the same volume, shouldn't it?
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
You can make an argument that it should be more than 500, absolutely. At present... it's 12,000, which is about 2.5% of the entire VA workforce.
And of course, only about $600,000,000 of fraud hitting taxpayers, so no biggie.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I have no problem reducing the number of authorized cardholders from 12,000 to 850. I would support that argument.
Less than 1%.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I can speculate, but I don't have direct knowledge.
1) The more people with purchasing authorization you have, the higher the likelihood of fraud, and the higher the threshold for action against fraud ends up being. It's hard to tackle $50 worth of fraud happening across 5,000 people... so companies end up looking for big and obvious fraud and the threshold rises. I'm extrapolating based on the type of fraud monitoring I see in my company with respect to provider charges. If the claim is less than $5,000 we pretty much just ignore it, because there are so many claims it would be impossible to evaluate all of them. We absolutely know we're overcharged for things, but we can only reasonable monitor a small number of claims, so we only focus on the big ones. So I assume that the same dynamic is in place here - it's really only the big cases of fraud that get actioned. The article references 1% fraud, which ends up being $600 Million.
2) There is an administrative cost to having that many cardholders. Cards have fees associated with them, charge tracking, billing, accounting, etc. Those things aren't free, and the costs add up. Having fewer cardholders means having fewer costs.
3) With more purchasers, there's a higher likelihood of ending up with duplicated items. It's entirely possible that the needed item already exists within the facility, or at a nearby facility, so there's no need to order one. In your example, sure, it's *easier* for each department to order what they think they need... but that also means that Department A might order three widgets and only use two of them, then Department B orders four widgets and only uses two of them, and Department C finds they need a widget so they order one because they aren't aware that there are three spare widgets sitting around between Departments A and B. Having more purchasers increases the risk of having duplicates that aren't all well-tracked and accounted for, leading to inefficient purchases and overspend.
4) Bulk purchasing can usually get better pricing. When there's centralized purchasing, especially for more commonly used items, you get a deal. If every department in my company were to go out and buy their own laptops, for example, the cost would be many times higher than having one small part of our tech services department purchase all of the laptops for the company in bulk.
Donal
Philosopher
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first off, your math is way wrong. 6,000,000,000 / 100 = 60,000,000. But, I fully expect you to keep arguing its $600 million.
second, that's a drop in the bucket. how may billions has gone to Musk's companies?
third, what is being lost by these measures? What is an acceptable number of dead veterans for you? Do you realize we'll end up spending more money to fix the damage by these mindless, ignorant, and pointless cuts?