Aprendamos com Herr Memmert!

“Germans think ‘the state is clever—the citizen is stupid’. We have to get more flexible,” diz Herr Memmert, um alemão que eu admiro. De um artigo do The Economist onde se ilustra a atracção da estupidez às portas:

Mr Memmert is one example; he even won an innovation award. He saw a crunch coming in 2008. In a town that once had five doctors, several had retired and the others were thinking of leaving. The 9,000 residents were at risk of having no doctor at all. A care home for the old would have had to close; families would have had to move for lack of paediatric care. So Mr Memmert found ten doctors in fairly distant cities in Lower Saxony and an investor in Nuremberg. He offered them the use of a big empty building, where a discount store had moved out, and persuaded them to take turns commuting to the town for one or two days a week, without quitting their old practices. Between them the doctors and a physiotherapist give continuous service. The first hurdle was the doctors’ association, a state-sponsored agency of self-regulation; it refused to grant permits. Mr Memmert overcame that with fierce lobbying. Then came volumes of pedantic laws. Mr Memmert either bent them or complied as far as possible. The physiotherapist, for example, must use a separate door, for reasons nobody quite understands. [ênfase meu]