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The vaccine rollout is so typical of this country's approach to delivering public goods. A decentralized and underfunded patchwork of organizations tasked with moving mountains by a federal government motivated primarily by a fanatical fear of the wrong people receiving benefit.
The result: A system ripe for bad faith grift and line-cutting by the wealthy and powerful that fails to deliver promised benefits at twice the necessary expense, thereby undercutting public faith in the program and leading to further decentralization and stigmatization.
It's far from an original insight, but I keep being struck by how much more humane and effective our public programs would be if they were motivated by a fear of people who need them *not* receiving services rather than people who don't getting something by mistake.
One final thought, because this seems to be resonating: It's obvious to most people that failed vaccine rollout harms people not directly stigmatized by keeping community transmission alive. *The same is true of almost all public programs*. When we harm others, we harm ourselves.
