” the federal government is the customer,” NO, we are the customer. We pay for it through payroll deductions. Just like Social Security is ours because we have already paid for through payroll deductions. Now, disability payments are not the receivers if they are getting it when they have not worked for it,(I understand someone can get it without being a worker, If I am wrong on this I can be corrected) But one has paid for it through deductions it theirs.
No... I understand your point, but no, we are not the customer in the context to which I referred.
With Medicare and Medicaid, and any insurance as well, we are a customer of the doctor or hospital, yes... but we are ALSO a customer of our insurance provider... and the insurance provider is a customer of the doctor or hospital too.
Let’s say there’s a service that bills out $120, where the government pays the hospital $100 and we patients pay the hospital a $20 copay. Then both the government and we patients are customers, and the hospital is a vendor.
Now, as patients, we don’t have a contract with the hospital... but our insurance provider holds that contract with them. The rack rate for the service would’ve been $300 or $400, but their contract sets the price, as a mix between the insurance company’s $100 and our $20 copay.
My point in this column is that since the government is the doctor’s customer, the one who negotiates the contract, the government has a right (just like any private insurance company has) to ask his vendor to agree to an amendment.
These amendments might be a change in terms (60 days to pay instead of a desired 30, for example), or a change in billing processes, or a commitment to employ doctors or nurses with certain different degrees (like saying they want all the nurses to be RNs or to be Nurse Practitioners).
In the same way, the government could have asked for an amendment to their Medicare or Medicaid agreement saying that they want all the staff to take the experimental vaccine, and then the companies would have had time to consider it, or to push back, or to negotiate a compromise...
But in my opinion, under no circumstance could the customer (again, in this case, the federal government) just issue a mandate on their vendor that did not previously exist in the contract.
What they tried to do was to go around the contract, and say “it’s a law now, so it doesn’t have to be in the contract”... but since it’s not a legal law... it’s not something the government has the power to mandate... they can’t get away with that. They should have gone after the goal through proper amendment requests to their contractual agreements.
This would of course be a painstaking process; the federal government doesn’t like acting like responsible private parties do, with honest contracting.
And that’s exactly why the government should be forced to do so. These petty tyrants need to learn what the real world is like, and comport themselves like normal human beings.
JFD