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You should have a primary care doctor who is your main point of contact for all of your health care. You can request that the other doctors that you have seen send their records to your primary care doctor. His office should help you with your disability claim.You are entitled to get copies of your own medical records from your doctors and the hospital. All you have to do is call and ask. They will have you sign a release and will then give you their records. There might be a charge for this. Once you have all of your own medical records, you can take them wherever you wish.I keep copies of all of my own medical records. If I go to a new doctor, I pull out the pertinent reports and take them with me. I am the only one who has copies of all of my medical reports.

When I joined the IPS, like almost everybody else, I had this idea that if you are sincere and try hard, you can get a lot done.Surprisingly, while it is not that hard to get a battalion of men to clamp down on a law and order problem in minutes, making the government machinery move is another matter.The first thing to hit you on joining government is ‘files’. For everything in government, there is a file. In case you are wondering what this creature called ‘file’ looks like, see the image below.This creature (file) has a problem: It has massive inertia, which would have even befuddled Sir Issac Newton. It just does not move. There is an army of human beings called ‘clerks’ whose life’s mission is to move them, but evidently they live in slow motion. What is the rush? Between tea and lunch breaks, they give it a gentle nudge. And it still does not move.Why?One answer is that Indians are lazy. Or human beings are lazy. Or that the animal kingdom is lazy.Well, think again. The same Indian (human being) working in TCS or Wipro works faster. In McKinsey, he is even faster. But you could argue that the type of people who go to government are lazy, who are seeking job security and nothing else.I would concede that partly, but even in government there are people, especially in higher ranks who want to change that. Are they able to make an impact? Why not?There are deep reasons why government is inefficient and slow. Here are a few of them:There are too many layers in the government. As an example, the office of Trivandrum Police Commissioner had 100 clerks and civilian staff to help run the administration. Every file has to be seen by 3–4 staff members (Section Clerk, JS, SS, and Sr AA) before it reaches the Commissioner.If each guy takes 3 days, that is 12 days for the file to reach Commissioner’s desk. Then the file comes back through the same route with Commissioner’s order. Then again it will be put up with some clarification, going on the same long journey.If a file goes up and down a few times, that is a month or two gone by easily. When I say easily, I mean ‘no sweat’ easily. This is assuming that nobody decides to just park the file for 6 months.This was the speed of file movement within an office. Now imagine communication between different offices, and ultimately between different governments. Hell will freeze over before anything happens on its own. People who are affected by the files follow up with the babus, flatter them, and sometimes bribe them to get things done. Else, you can wait forever.Job security breeds laziness and ‘don’t care’ attitude: All kinds of people join government but many are looking for a secure job for life.What does job security mean? It means, “I can do whatever I like but I still won’t lose my job”. With that mindset, don’t expect magic. Mind you, not everybody is like that and I guess for every 5 lazy guys, there is one hard working soul as well. That guy carries the burden and all work is dumped on her or him. I have done that too.Not convinced? Have you ever gone to a government office, where the employee refuses to look up at you, or tells you to come another day with some excuse like, ‘Saahib meeting mein hain’?Even a hard working conscientious person joining government will get disillusioned pretty quickly. Else he will be slogging all his life with no reward whatsoever, and some do that.Decline and stagnation: In private sector, you have to become somewhat better over time. Obviously there are exceptions in both places, but in government, you can stagnate for 30 years and nothing will happen to you. And most people do stagnate. I suspect many decline quite a bit.No incentive to move fast and take decisions. If you work hard and take quick decisions, something may go wrong. If that happens your life will be hell. But if you chill, and defer decision making, nothing happens.This especially true for senior officials. How often has someone been hauled for slow decision making?Look at our defence procurement. It takes years to get anything done. And if someone tries to be a Rambo and push things quickly, just wait long enough, and CBI will probably knock on your door. And I am talking about honest guys, not the crooks. So everyone plays safe. One proof of that: If a clerical staff puts a noting on a file, virtually nobody will overrule him/her without thinking 100 times. I have seen that first hand.There is no protection against legitimate mistakes (real or perceived). Ideally, unless a bad decision was taken with bad motive or was done blatantly ignoring rules, officials should be given protection and encouragement to take decisions.To minimize risk and create diffused collective responsibility, they form committees. Now you are done for. It will actually take forever to get anything done. No committee ever shuts down. They will all survive till the Universe freezes.Government system is built on suspicion and not trust. Such a system will always be slow.Let me give you an example. If the CEO of Hindustan Unilever or Tata Steel wants to hire a consultant or buy a product, he can often decide without too much process and issue orders quickly.In government, you have to float a tender, which will take months and sometimes years. Even after the tender, you have to often go for the cheapest product or service, not the best one. I am not criticising the process or disagreeing with it, but just explaining how it works.Underperformance is not a problem: Have you seen anyone getting fired for moderate incompetence? Or even extreme incompetence? Probably one in 10 million? Maybe not even that.Inefficiency makes you powerful. If you work slowly, someone will come and beg you to do your work, and may even bribe you. If you do your work efficiently, nobody will come and ask for favours. You become unimportant! What would an average guy do?Government is nobody’s baby. It is a collective thing. How often we clean the verandah of our house? Daily? How often would do we step out and clean the road outside our house? I rest my case.Just a small anecdote. Once I was at the house of a relative who was a senior government official in Railways. In the lawn the water sprinkler was gushing and it was kind of flooded. So we asked the gardener as to why he was not closing the tap. He said with a smirk, ‘Sir, Railway ka paani hai!’.Government is like ‘Railway ka paani’. It belongs to everyone, and hence to no one. That is why we look for officers with missionary zeal to ‘clean up the system’. Private companies can make do with just the normal ‘somewhat smart guy’. They don’t need revolutionaries to make things work routinely. A system, which needs a Bhagat Singh to make it work is no system.Trade unions: The staff have immense collective power and few governments have the courage to discipline them. Not in India. So no reward, no incentive, no punishment, no work culture. And you still expect it to work?Demoralising work environment: People get quickly disillusioned, cynical, and give up. Imagine you are working in this dazzling office below. Why would you be fired up to come to office in the morning?Obviously my statements are generalisations, but I think reasonably accurate.Now compare government with a startup.I run a science learning startup called ConceptOwl. We have no ‘mai baap’. We strive everyday to deliver the best product that we can with literally 1% of the resources needed. We may not always succeed, but we try very hard.We want speed. One person decides, and then we implement. Right or wrong, we get things done.I teach science, and I do it with missionary zeal. ‘Acceptable quality’ is not acceptable. We keep trying to make things outstanding.We don’t care about job security. We care about building something. If you cared about job security, why would you be in a startup?I am not saying all is hunky dory in a startup, but we own our problems, we care about them, and we struggle everyday to make things work. If we fail, we correct the mistakes.Finally, we don’t have committees. The day we form our first committee will be the day I will shut down ConceptOwl.Who is benefitting here? I would say ‘Nobody’. Not even government employees. Government gives them a secure job, but all the fun in life is gone.It has been 70 years since independence. We can’t blame the British. We can’t blame the CIA. We can’t blame anyone.Will we raise our voice against this monstrous waste?

I have permanent handicap parking privileges (for over 10 years) that were filed with the State of Nevada DMV after a proper form was filled out by my doctor. I’ve had a hip replacement and walking any distance can be painful at times. Artificial joint replacements have a limited lifespan. The ability to park close can help them last longer.A few summers ago I drove to the local Walmart supercenter, parked in handicap parking as usual. As the weather was somewhat decent that day, I opened the car door for a bit while I was finishing up a phone call. A man wearing a Walmart vest came up to my door, rapped on my window, and demanded that I move my car. I took my handicap placard off the dash, stuck it in his face and said this is mine and you need to leave me alone. He disappeared but I was pretty angry. I went looking for him inside Walmart. I discovered he was wearing an assistant managers name tag and he was keeping his distance from me because he knew I was pissed. That will never be allowed to happen again ever!!Edit 02/18/2020.I nearly forgot the following. I was still working at the time my doctor filled out the form and marked the status as permanent. So when I started to use handicapped parking by the building (medical office building) the director of hospital security for the campus I worked on, came to where I worked. He and I had a verbal confrontation over this. Basically I had to use a mention of rights under ADA regulations before he would back off. My car had a sticker for employee parking. That parking lot (no handicapped parking there) was across the street and half a block away. Handicapped parking was next to the building I worked in. A compromise of using handicapped parking was ultimately agreed on as long as I didn’t use the spot closest to the door.I no longer work there, thank goodness.You can’t be a wimp when it comes to your rights!! But it shouldn’t have to be that way. The general public is sadly uninformed about this. Unless we stand up for our rights it simply is not going to change anytime soon unfortunately.