Would public systems improve if the people designing them could not escape them?
By Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Psychologist | Author | Quantum Transformation Facilitator
The Semaj MindSpa — Where Mind, Spirit, and Science Meet
Here is a question worth sitting with: Should the people who make public policy be required to live, at least partly, with the consequences of that policy? If you design the public healthcare system, should you have to use it? If you determine what happens in public schools, should your children or grandchildren have to attend one? If you are responsible for public transportation, should you occasionally leave the government vehicle at home and take the bus? If you approve a minimum wage, could you survive on it? And if you decide how citizens must live, should you be allowed to purchase a private escape from the consequences? I suspect we would get very different policies if the people making them had more skin in the game.
Bill Bratton Went Underground
There is an instructive example from New York City.
William “Bill” Bratton—sometimes mistakenly called Bill Bratten—became chief of the New York City Transit Police in 1990. The subway system was then associated with crime, disorder, aggressive panhandling, fare evasion and public fear. Many New Yorkers considered it unsafe, particularly at night.
Bratton did not attempt to understand the system only from reports prepared in air-conditioned offices. He went into the subway. Years later, during another period as New York’s police commissioner, he announced that he would again ride late-night trains to see the conditions passengers experienced for himself. Bratton’s operational philosophy required command staff and patrol officers to be physically present in the system, enforcing order, observing conditions firsthand, and modeling the behavior expected of the rank‑and‑file. They were required to park their cars and ride the subway.
He wanted all responsible for the policies to have a firsthand view of the environment they were responsible for policing. WNYC reported that Bratton undertook late-night subway rides specifically to assess passengers’ quality-of-life concerns. That matters.
The New York transit-policing story is complicated. Bratton’s “broken windows” approach – aggressively addressing fare evasion and other minor offences – has been credited with helping to restore order, but it has also been criticised for criminalising poverty and disproportionately affecting Black and Latino citizens. We should not romanticise it. Still, there is a valuable leadership lesson: Bratton entered the environment before claiming to fully understand it. He did not merely study the subway. He experienced something of what it meant to be a passenger inside it.
Policy Looks Different from the Back Seat
Too many policies are made from a distance. The minister travels with a driver. The citizen waits two hours for a bus. The senior official has private health insurance. The citizen reaches the hospital at 5:00 in the morning and is still sitting on a hard chair at midday. The policymaker’s child attends a well-resourced private school. The citizen’s child enters a classroom with forty students, limited equipment and an exhausted teacher. Both groups may technically live in the same country. Psychologically and practically, however, they occupy different worlds.
It is easier to tolerate a broken system when you do not have to depend on it. A three-month wait for a medical procedure is a statistic until it is your pain keeping you awake at night. An overcrowded classroom is an administrative problem until it is your child who cannot get the teacher’s attention. An unreliable bus service is an operational challenge until you are standing in Half-Way Tree, watching the time and wondering whether another late arrival will cost you your job. Distance dulls urgency. Privilege can function as insulation. It allows those with resources to support public systems in principle while escaping them in practice.
What If They Had to Use the Healthcare System Provided?
Imagine that every minister of health, senior health official and member of the parliamentary health committee had to receive routine care through the public system. Not emergency treatment arranged after somebody makes a telephone call. Not a special room because the hospital recognises the name. The ordinary experience.
Register at the desk. Sit in the waiting area. Try to find a working bathroom. Wait for the test result. Return three weeks later because the machine was down. Attempt to fill the prescription when the medication is unavailable.
Would waiting times still be treated as unfortunate but unavoidable? Would malfunctioning equipment remain unrepaired for months? Would patient dignity receive more than ceremonial attention? I suspect healthcare policy would become less abstract very quickly.
This does not mean policymakers should be denied private healthcare. They and their families remain citizens with personal freedoms. Compelling a sick person to accept inadequate treatment merely to prove a political point would be cruel, perhaps even dangerous. But there is a reasonable principle between total exemption and forced suffering: Those responsible for a public system should be required to experience it regularly, honestly and without preferential treatment.
What If Their Children Had to Use the Schools Provided?
Now consider education. A politician may tell parents that the public school system is improving while sending his or her own child somewhere else. Perhaps the private choice is understandable. Most parents will use whatever resources they have to give their children the best opportunity. I would hesitate to condemn them for that. But the contradiction remains. If the people with the greatest influence over public education consistently remove their children from it, who inside the centres of power feels the daily consequences when the system declines?
Who receives the phone call about the missing teacher? Who sees that the science laboratory has no usable equipment? Who discovers that the child who left home at 5:30 a.m. is expected to concentrate through an entire school day without a proper breakfast? Who worries that a bright student is quietly disappearing in a class too large for anyone to notice?
Where affluent and politically connected families use the same schools as everyone else, they become a powerful constituency for maintaining quality. The school is no longer something government provides for “those people.” It is the institution educating our children. That one shift in pronoun may change everything.
Where Does This Actually Happen?
There are few countries where politicians are legally required to use only public services. Freedom of choice, family rights, security concerns and medical necessity make such laws difficult. The principle appears instead in cultures where public institutions are good enough that wealthy and influential citizens willingly continue to use them.
Finland is frequently discussed in this context. Its comprehensive school system was built around the idea that children should have access to good education regardless of family income or location. The strength of such a model is not simply that poorer families receive a service. It is that public education becomes a shared national institution rather than a last resort for people without alternatives.
We also see the principle through structured immersion. Policymakers spend time with frontline workers, ride public transportation, visit hospitals without elaborate advance preparation, or involve actual service users in designing policy. The OECD now recognises interviews, usability testing and co-design with citizens as important parts of building more human-centred public services. Its 2026 Digital Government Outlook notes that involving users in service design has become an increasingly recognised practice across governments.
But a carefully managed tour is not the same as lived experience. Everyone behaves differently when the minister is coming. The floor is swept. The broken light is replaced. Extra staff appear. Patients are moved. Somebody finds medication that was supposedly unavailable yesterday. A policymaker learns very little from visiting a performance staged for the policymaker.
Jamaica’s Two-System Problem
In Jamaica, we appear to have developed parallel systems. One system is for those who can pay, call somebody, or use a personal connection. The other is for everybody else. There is private healthcare and public healthcare. Private education and public education. Private security and public policing. A personal vehicle and public transportation. A generator and the electricity system. A water tank and the public water supply.
Those who can afford it increasingly build small private countries around themselves. They are not necessarily bad people. Many are simply protecting their families from systems they do not trust. The deeper problem is that the people with the loudest voices and strongest networks then have less reason to demand that public systems work. They have already purchased their exit. This weakens the social contract.
When influential citizens no longer depend on public institutions, public failure becomes easier to tolerate. Poor service is gradually normalised for people who have no alternative. The road is bad, but the SUV can manage it. The electricity is unreliable, but the generator starts automatically. The hospital is overwhelmed, but the insurance card opens another door. The school is struggling, but the children are already somewhere else. The inconvenience has been privatised. Unfortunately, so has much of the urgency.
Would Mandatory Exposure Solve Everything?
No. Using a public hospital once does not make someone an expert in health policy. Riding a bus for one week will not reveal the full complexity of transportation planning. Sending a politician’s child to a public school will not automatically produce better teachers, stronger leadership or more resources.
There is also a danger of political theatre. A minister may ride the bus one morning, surrounded by cameras and security personnel, then return to the official vehicle before lunch. That is not shared experience. It is content.
Good policymaking still requires research, data, consultation, technical knowledge and honest evaluation. Personal experience can sharpen judgment, but it can also distort it. One pleasant hospital visit does not prove the healthcare system is functioning. One frightening bus ride does not describe the experience of every commuter. Lived experience should inform the evidence – not replace it.
A Public-Service Reality Test
Perhaps we do not need a law forcing every policymaker to use public services exclusively. We may need something more practical and psychologically honest. Every minister and senior public official responsible for a major public system could be required to undertake periodic, unannounced immersion in that system. Ride the bus during peak hours. Attend a public clinic without receiving VIP treatment. Spend a complete day in an overcrowded school. Attempt to access a government service through the same telephone number or website given to the public. Try to live for one month on the minimum wage before voting on it. Then publish what was experienced, what failed and what will be corrected.
More importantly, governments should include ordinary service users in policy design from the beginning – not invite them merely to approve decisions already made. That would not eliminate incompetence or political self-interest. It might, however, make indifference more difficult.
The Semaj MindSpa Takeaway
Leadership without consequence can become careless. When policymakers are protected from the systems they create, they may measure success by reports, budgets and announcements. Citizens measure it differently. Can I see a doctor? Can my child learn? Can I travel safely? Can I afford food after paying the bills? Can I receive a government service without begging, calling a friend or “linking” somebody?
The real test of a public policy is not how impressive it sounds at the press conference. It is what happens when an ordinary citizen tries to live under it on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Perhaps policymakers should not be forced to live permanently without choices. But they should never be allowed to govern without meaningful exposure to the consequences of their decisions. If a policy is considered good enough for the people, those who created it should be willing to experience it. And if they are unwilling to live with it, perhaps they already know something the citizens have been trying to tell them. A public system should not be the punishment for being unable to afford a private one.