Are Public Services like the Millennium Bug?

During the Millennium Bug scare

...top British Airways executives plan to be aloft as the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31, 1999 -- a gesture to signal confidence that the airline's planes would not be falling out of the sky as a result of computer chaos

and, if I recall correctly, some countries forced their airline executives to do the same.

What if something similar was to apply to public services?  Could services be improved by making those people who make decisions that affect the services be forced about them use them?  Should ministers - and potentially decision makers in LEAs be banned from sending their children to private schools? Or ministers and NHS decision makers be banned from using private health care?

Appealing as the idea might be - after all, what better incentive to ensure that services are properly resourced than knowing that your children's education would be affected or that a family member could die in an underfunded and/or poorly managed hospital - I believe the answer has to be no.  It might concentrate their minds, but can it possibly be fair for the children to suffer for their parent's actions? 


Of course, as an eternal optimist(ish) I like to thing that people make these decisions because they truly believe that they are the best way to improve things.  If that is in fact the case then holding their family to ransom wouldn't make the slightest difference anyway.


Nice idea though.