As a little adjunct to the earlier thread on government contracting, I'll relate this story...
A few years ago, my company partnered with another to provide some hardware and software upgrades to medicare (hope you don't mind if I don't reveal which state, lets just say its up north). We provided the HW (IBM servers, racks, power equipment, network switches, etc), and our partner did the SW integration (upgrading an old package to work with some new requirements). We had to provide 2 redundant sets of exact HW (they had to have an 2nd site as a backup), cost of each set was about $75K, not including the software. Total cost of the contract - about $300K of your taxpayer dollars.
So this week I hear that the 2nd set of Servers ($75K worth of completely working and totally fine equipment), now being completely depreciated, was required by the government bean-counter in charge to be tossed into a dumpster and thrown away. Thats right folks - THROWN AWAY - despite being barely used (if at all, since they haven't needed to run from the backup site), they took this equipment and chucked it in a dumpster.
Oh no, they couldn't give it to a school, or a charity, or send it someplace where someone might get some actual use out of it, like maybe another medicare office, oh no - that might make too much sense.
Keep this in mind that next time somebody tells you how much better it would be if the government ran the health care system....
EagleDNY
$.02
