RE: Hospital system overwhelmed
August 26, 2021 at 11:06 am
(This post was last modified: August 26, 2021 at 11:14 am by The Grand Nudger.)
We can staff more hospitals than we have, and quickly, just not profitably.
IMO, yeah, we should have capacity for some what if scenarios - that's when we'd need it the most with the least ability to construct it on the spot. It may cost a bit extra year over year - but is that additional cost more or less the cost of...say covid? The dollar amount of money lost or saved or made can't be determined by the tiny fraction of whatever it cost to save a life, as wealth and productivity compound generationally and exponentially. If you save one life at a cost of a million dollars, very quickly, that one life has made many others and advantaged many others and their combined productivity dwarfs the cost of the medical bills that (at least in present) represent a death sentence. Even very poor peoples individual productivity is greater than the savings we might clinch by letting them die. It's a no brainer, and that's why we do have such systems to save those lives in place, even if they're insufficient. Why we do have some non profit hosptials with capacity that exceeds community ability to pay for or support them in any given moment. Why we subsidize healthcare.
Ultimately, though, if life itself is for profit, none of that matters. We can contextualize our state of affairs as silently and implicitly accepting that only the most productive individual lives at the moment of their sickness get to be saved, regardless of how much they made before, or will amount to after. Check your bank accounts today - do you deserve to live?
IMO, yeah, we should have capacity for some what if scenarios - that's when we'd need it the most with the least ability to construct it on the spot. It may cost a bit extra year over year - but is that additional cost more or less the cost of...say covid? The dollar amount of money lost or saved or made can't be determined by the tiny fraction of whatever it cost to save a life, as wealth and productivity compound generationally and exponentially. If you save one life at a cost of a million dollars, very quickly, that one life has made many others and advantaged many others and their combined productivity dwarfs the cost of the medical bills that (at least in present) represent a death sentence. Even very poor peoples individual productivity is greater than the savings we might clinch by letting them die. It's a no brainer, and that's why we do have such systems to save those lives in place, even if they're insufficient. Why we do have some non profit hosptials with capacity that exceeds community ability to pay for or support them in any given moment. Why we subsidize healthcare.
Ultimately, though, if life itself is for profit, none of that matters. We can contextualize our state of affairs as silently and implicitly accepting that only the most productive individual lives at the moment of their sickness get to be saved, regardless of how much they made before, or will amount to after. Check your bank accounts today - do you deserve to live?
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