Yup. 6 doesn't sound like a lot but if it's all the beds in the ICU it's still 100%.Originally Posted by Joe in PNG
Yup. 6 doesn't sound like a lot but if it's all the beds in the ICU it's still 100%.
For further perspective, that hospital has 75 licensed beds which means that it is rather small. 75 is a maximum as most hospitals have enough staffing to operate most but rarely all of the beds at any given time.
Moreover, it would not surprise me if 6 beds is the extent of their ICU. I would be very surprised if those beds are covered by an intensivist 24/7; mostly a combination of internal and family medicine trained hospitalists +/- a tele-ICU capability. That typically means they can hand a little sepsis or non-invasive ventilation. 6 patients with severe ARDS and multi-system organ failure from COVID would overwhelm that system.
I like my rifles like my women - short, light, fast, brown, and suppressed.
Sorry in advance for the diversion and drift.
I've called it "The Crazy Years," a la Heinlein, but I think it is a widespread lack of belief that the Republic means anything anymore.
Crisis divides us further, so what exactly is the point of the USA if it can't help much with serious problems?
The small government advocates won. They made their vision of a government that is always ineffectual a reality. They got a big boost from big government advocates who made sure every policy was studied, formulated, and promoted by folks with no buy-in to the results of said policy and/or direct connections to busness entities who have a strong position to make enormous profits with privatized solutions financed by public dollars.
Our military doesn't exist to win wars. It exists to buy expensive weapons systems, and advertise the superiority of them to the options served up by competing nations.
Our solution to providing higher education for the nation? Provide a student loan set-up where the only way to default is death. By law. Works great for the DeVos family.
"Failing" (total bullshit, BTW. When we compare our system to say, Japan, we include everyone, Japan is only showing the students who didn't get pushed into vocational education. That tends to skew things a bit.) education? Let's put public money into thousands of privately owned magic bullets, never mind the fact they all have a 10 year half-life, under ideal circumstances, we will have new very expensive magic bullets to replace them by then. Or go all the way with charter schools where 20% of public funds, typically, just turns into private profits with track records of success overall no better or worse than purely public schools. (I have no problem with individual charters, often they do a great job in a niche, it's the idea of charter-run systems that is complete grift.)
Mostly our system serves a rent-seeking class that thinks an ever increasing share of the pie is their right as the owners of the country.
Why should anyone outside that class have much belief in where the USA is going?
And the global economic system is largely an American system. Which is why so much of the planet is facing the same issues.
Given all that, why place much importance on public duty, or honor, when graft is obviously the marker of "the winners" in our culture?
TL;DR: Most folks realized they aren't part of the class that owns the world, and no amount of hard work is likely to increase their ownership much. And folks screaming "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" are likely rich, retired, or nearly retired and have no clue things are different than when they got out of school in the early 70s.
We are in a singularity. (Not The Singularity of tech bro fantasy) No one has much clue what lies next. That's usually when violence as a signifier of group identity becomes very important. "We may not know all the solutions, but we know who creates the problems!"
Given chaos, graft is a highly logical response. $$$ is always good, rewards for decent behavior seem increasingly uncertain.
On a completely unrelated ( 😈 ) note, I decided to get the fuck out of public service myself this week. It's a path to certain misery. Good lessons, but it looks like I'm going back to foodservice. Hopefully sooner than later. The current job market is pretty amazing.
Last edited by Baldanders; 09-08-2021 at 10:21 PM.
REPETITION CREATES BELIEF
REPETITION BUILDS THE SEPARATE WORLDS WE LIVE AND DIE IN
NO EXCEPTIONS
Maybe a "trade in your crappy gun/baseball bat/shiv for a nice semiauto Beretta 12g" program for such events? With plenty of heavy birdshot shells in big baskets free for the taking in baskets along the road every 6 feet or so.
Minimal collateral damage and plenty of free (if scratched) guns for decent people afterwards.
REPETITION CREATES BELIEF
REPETITION BUILDS THE SEPARATE WORLDS WE LIVE AND DIE IN
NO EXCEPTIONS
Much of rural NC saw their access to even standard ER rooms evaporate as Vidant Health closed hospitals to increase profitability in the past decade..They "couldn't afford it."
Bonuses equal to the amount needed to keep the hospitals open for the guy who decided to close them? Surprisingly affordable!
Hey, I'm sure an extra 30 miles on an ambulance/lifeflight trip won't lower anyone's chances of survival from a heart attack or anything, right?
REPETITION CREATES BELIEF
REPETITION BUILDS THE SEPARATE WORLDS WE LIVE AND DIE IN
NO EXCEPTIONS
Speaking as someone who worked as lower level management in a hospital system and saw this first hand:
If your chances of survival are lowered, too bad.
A hospital costs money to run. Many small hospitals are under water financially. Even in NYC, something like 18 hospitals have closed in the last two decades.
You can't magically snap your fingers and make hospitals run without funding, regardless of being a counter-culture (needless contrarian?) edgelord.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
Missouri (Republican) lawmakers voted against medicaid expansion in the state some years ago, despite the fact that it would be a huge benefit to rural hospitals that serviced largely Republican areas (the Democratic urban centers have hospitals). The question got put to voter referendum and the passed with a fair amount of Republican voter (not politician) support. Republican lawmakers in the state basically said the citizens could vote for it, but they didn't have to do it (going against the Republican governor who wanted to implement it). So rural residents get screwed by their own elected officials for a few years while the governor deals with the court ruling against the legislature.
As @Bio stated, their would have been little issue with funding with medicaid expansion.
But our Republican legislature saved us from that.
Just like they saved us from counties developing high speed internet on their own to "prevent government competition with the free market!" So instead of universal high speed internet installed 10 years ago, we have a patchwork of very expensive, very poorly performing services with small areas of service.
Certainly you see the difference between closing small hospitals in a densely populated urban region closing, with plenty of other hospitals, as opposed to closing the SOLE provider of emergency services in a county?
But the mentality in your post is pretty typical of many Americans who have been so heavily propagandized by our ownership class: "see you stupid hippie shit, IT'S BASIC ECONOMICS! WE CAN'T AFFORD IT! YOU'D BANKRUPT US!"
Which makes sense if you think that the only way to fund healthcare is too have an atomized and privatized system where every hospital must "pull its weight."
Or you could approach the question from an actual public health policy orientation and figure out how to deliver OK emergency care to our rural areas, perhaps by spreading out the cost over a large public health care system, instead of going for the profit-maximizing social Darwinist approach?
But the way we do it is neither orientated towards a goal of universal decent healthcare nor maximizing individual treatment outcomes. It's based on profits. And our efficiency in terms of spending to results/coverage among wealthy nations is shitty:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...stract/2674671
Conclusions and Relevance The United States spent approximately twice as much as other high-income countries on medical care, yet utilization rates in the United States were largely similar to those in other nations. Prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals, and administrative costs appeared to be the major drivers of the difference in overall cost between the United States and other high-income countries. As patients, physicians, policy makers, and legislators actively debate the future of the US health system, data such as these are needed to inform policy decisions.
As if we based policy on data. In the US, healthcare policy grows out of corporate needs.
But good job expounding the views of our parasitic rentier class.
Last edited by Baldanders; 09-08-2021 at 11:43 PM.
REPETITION CREATES BELIEF
REPETITION BUILDS THE SEPARATE WORLDS WE LIVE AND DIE IN
NO EXCEPTIONS
I see the difference between viable and unviable based on patient census, yes.
Whether republicans, democrats or the lizard people coulda/woulda/shoulda is pretty irrelevant to decisions based on the situation in reality. If there's no money to run the hospital, there's no money to run the hospital.
"Are you ready? Okay. Let's roll."- Last words of Todd Beamer
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