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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmerica is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should never be a for-profit business
America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should never be a for-profit business
Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday February 27, 2020 · 2:23 PM EST
For four decades, American corporations have been caught up in a whole series of refinements that are intended to improve efficiency and productivity. Our processes are lean. Our efficiency is six-sigma. Our productivity has mysteriously run far ahead of employee compensation in a way that has made CEOs billionaires while leaving workers on food stamps.
Its a system that maximizes profit. But its also a system that assumes that everything can be stripped to the bare bones; that business can make do with minimal staffing, minimal supplies, minimal alternatives. Nothing is there that makes the system in the least unprofitable. The system stands like a house of glass, waiting for something to challenge its fragility.
And in the United States, health care is just that kind of system.
Like every other system in America, we now have a super-lean, infinite-sigma healthcare system, absolutely dependent on every cog remaining in place. Its one in which there are fewer than a million hospital beds for the entire nation; one in which many, many rural counties have no hospital at all. Because thats the most profitable way of running the system, and thats what happens when health care is subjected to the winnowing of the marketplacejust barely enough health care, at the highest possible prices people will tolerate without demanding a change.
Its exactly where a nation does not want to be when encountering a health crisis. And its why America is, unfortunately, about to get a lesson in why there is much more to a national health system than whether you pay for it in taxes or with checks to an insurance company.
snip//
By treating health care like a business, Americans have already seen one of the first people who dared ask to be tested for COVID-19 get handed a bill for thousands of dollars, the primary result of which will be to dissuade other Americans from asking to be tested. Which is, right there, exactly the result that is best for insurance companiesand worst for the nation.
Its an absolute certainty that Americans will hide their sniffles, drown their symptoms in over-the-counter drugs, and try to tough it out because they cant afford health care. Besides, they have no paid sick leave, no paid child care, and no guarantee that missing a days work wont mean being cast to the curb. All that socialist crap.
And because our whole system runs so excellently lean, American hospitals are already seeing shortages of everything from gowns to masks to painkillers, because the single-source, lowest-price vendor of those items happens to be in an area thats already been overrun with the coronavirus. Not only have those factories on the far side of the planet been sitting idle for weeks, but what production has been available has been needed close to home.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/27/1922487/-America-is-about-to-get-a-godawful-lesson-in-why-health-care-should-never-be-a-for-profit-business?detail=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3RU2032rvqevWw7ynTVvX_uZYxXCA9xvjcO6GogkrMZ377xG0D99aHx8M
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America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should never be a for-profit business (Original Post)
babylonsister
Feb 2020
OP
jimfields33
(16,073 posts)1. Even China has national healthcare
Italy and South Korea does too. I am glad since they are the countries most affected.
leftstreet
(36,118 posts)2. DURec
global1
(25,294 posts)3. Covid-19 Could Achieve What Impeachment And The Primarying Dems Couldn't.....
it could expose both Trump and aid in his demise and generate more support for a Medicare For All health care system.
gopiscrap
(23,766 posts)4. I was the product of "socialized" health care as a child
and it saved my life, had I been in the US I probably would have died
Wounded Bear
(58,766 posts)5. There used to be a network of county hospitals around the country...
worked fairly well AFAIK. Since Nixon, they've been profitizing everything.
The US Healthcare Industry is not ready for this.
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,544 posts)6. The wealth care system is doing well. Too bad about us.