Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

I don't think it is a realistic option in the US, at least in the current climate.

There are so many powerful and influential anti/small-government that are rabidly opposing anything made by the government, and offered to the people.

The argument is always the same:

- "It will stifle innovation"

- "It is unfair to business"

- "It will make people dependent on the government"

- "It will give government more access to spy on the citizens"

and the list goes on.

For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.

And it is especially bad right now. You had MAGA-influencers outright rejoicing that DOGE had laid off the 18F team, spreading the gospel that free (government-run) tax tools are an abomination.

>For decades the American people have been told that anything the government touches will be expensive, inefficient, and lead to a more taxes. Private sector knows best, and all that.

Do you have some counter arguments?

Do you mean US examples or world wide examples?

Because I think the whole government are inefficient and suck is partly a self fulfilling prophecy.

Swiss railways or how Taiwan created the semiconductor industry from scratch comes to mind. Estonia E-Government. Or like the Panama canal?

Well, every municipal broadband service I've tried has been better than the laughable garbage some ISPs offer out in rural areas, where they have a monopoly.

Making an assertion without arguments does not necessitate counter arguments.

i wish i was not sympathetic to those arguments - and i used to not be, but then i actually worked in the federal government. perhaps local governments can efficiently provision services but the feds are handicapped in so many different ways it would be quite challenging to untangle.

realistically, the workforce that was hired around sorting through hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic paper documents in the 70s/80s is not the same workforce that can really build new products and the feds are mostly the former.

Any european who happened to have become sick once in the US can tell you about that if you will.

Silicon Valley

i have friends who have had to deal with the NHS and absolutely ridiculous (like year+) wait times for specialists.

frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance. most of the problems arise because we don’t have any sort of triage for high need issues and thus get overutilization and high cost.

From personal experience, the quality of your insurance has little to do with wait times. I had best-in-biz FAANG insurance and I still had to wait months for dermatology and ENT appointments, for example.

The quality of your insurance definitely impacts wait times. HMOs are often faster and if you have medicaid you're going to look at much longer wait times for the specialists that accept it.

Months for specialists sounds bad (during covid the waits in the Bay Area got pretty bad), but for context on the NHS, they are currently targeting having more than 65% of patients served within ~5 months and they don't even make that target. Even the extremely capacity constrained Bay Area isn't close to that level of dysfunction.

18F was definitively the latter.

You'd be surprised how bad FAANG is, too.

> frankly i find the american healthcare system quite good if you have good job-tied insurance

Soviet union was fine too if you were an apparatchik…

Having worked in FAANG and for the Feds (on a project that was in collaboration with 18F, to boot), I respectfully disagree. You simply do not get the same calibre of technical operators or even just product operators in the federal government, full stop. Maybe they exist, but they're going to be occupying high up/plum positions because people like that are so rare.

In practice, it is software consulting companies that are doing all of the heavy lifting while the federal workers largely sit back and collect their paycheck - and talented operators are extremely rare there as well.