I don't believe the American culture is capable of dealing with major crises, particularly crises that require people to pull together.
The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
261–270 of 369 posts
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is true. In emergencies we explicitly do not allow price gouging because it just doesn't work. If it was a free market then the vaccine would cost 10k and few of those who benefit most would get it. That's not efficient or fair.
Actually freezing prices is the best way to create long term shortages. We saw that last springs when countries with free markets kept having N95 masks available, at slightly elevated prices while countries that imposed priced controls did not have any until fall. In a free market the vaccine would’ve cost 10k for a month while producers would’ve been scrambling to increase availability and production to take advanta…
In this case many of the manufacturers are American.
Secondly, the government can purchase the vaccine at “market price” and then distribute it at a fixed price. There’s no need to have price gouging (at least given a certain supply in the US)
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make a valid point when considering the total size of governments at all levels. However, I think what people most want to avoid is specifically an excessively large government at the federal and (to a much lesser degree) state levels. This is a worthy goal. This is not unrelated to efficiency: the legendary inefficiency of the federal government is correlated with its bloat and unaccountability, problems which a…
power will always try to overflow its limits, no matter the size. the fed has a fairly limited mandate via the constitution, but federal politicians of all stripes are constantly grubbing for power, which is where the inefficiencies largely come from. the answer is not to focus on size, but how and why it's overflowing via power grabs. focusing on size leads to the wrong conclusions and the wrong responses. that's th…
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Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, the $36B lost to unemployment fraud (10% of payments) in the past 12 months definitely illustrates that some amount of guardrails are still appropriate. There is an optimum level somewhere in between where the sum total of losses & overhead together are minimized.
That $36B is a drop in the bucket on the scale of a country. It's 25% of Jeff Bezos's net worth. How many $B spent on enforcement is it worth to reduce that to, say, $30B?
If you read the news about it, the scams were depressingly basic & the screening failures were rudimentary. It will not cost billions of dollars to rein that number in dramatically.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#265In Spain we had many cases of politicians and public people using this excuse to get vaccinated before the rest (even bishops used it, and not only one!). I think it would be an easy to fix thing: Have a list of extra people available if you end up with an extra dose. It shouldn't be that hard, we had a year for preparing for this...
The point is that logistics are hard. Even if you have an "extras" list, there will be odd circumstances where you're forced to pivot. > we had a year for preparing for this... I hear this argument a lot. Health officials have been overworked just trying to stay on top of the pandemic. They aren't experts in logistics. The only way to have been more prepared is already have a plan pre-pandemic. Once you're in the mid…
We don’t need health officials to figure out how to ship things that are really cold really quickly. This could have been managed much better by the federal government overall. It shouldn’t fall to health departments to do this.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#266To open a batch you should have an equal amount of people already queued up for the shot. If at the end there are still unused shots for whatever reason I would give the doctor in charge full authority to use those however they see fit as long as they are not selling them for money or other benefits. Sadly the US has now a system where everyone with any responsibilities has zero authority and everyone with authority…
You can hardly expect people to wait around until you have enough people for a single vial. Wasting less than a single vial per day doesn't outweigh the downsides of making it harder to get vaccinated.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population…
I'm generally for social welfare programs, however the idea of "welfare queens (and kings)" is NOT fiction. I come from Belgium which has this problem quite notoriously. It is quite common for people to be abusing the social programs to stay unemployed and make more income than blue-collar workers. Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing a…
> Why don't they have goals and aspirations?
Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something, and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating.
Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.)
Yes, some unemployed people might turn to drink, drugs, or petty crime, but this can be solved by building community infrastructure. The ills of the Parisian banlieues, for example, are often ascribed not just to unemployment, but to the fact that all the cultural and leisure facilities that were promised back in the 1970s were never actually built.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was once involved with a young woman in a homeless program which was entirely defeated by this exact "wrong person" attitude. Get a homeless person an apartment? Great. But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making mone…
A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population…
I don’t know about welfare queens, but there are a massive number of older, white men blue collar workers who pretty much live off of disability for their “bad backs”
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the logic is reasonable but the response is too strong. A doctor driving around vaccinating whoever he can find at their house is clearly not how you want to distribute the vaccine in early December, it's not going to get to the most at risk people as soon as it can and any issues that arise are a huge liability problem unless he can fix it with what's in his car. At the same time not having any plan or proce…
> A doctor driving around vaccinating whoever he can find at their house is clearly not how you want to distribute the vaccine in early December, it's not going to get to the most at risk people as soon as it can and any issues that arise are a huge liability problem unless he can fix it with what's in his car. No, but it is absolutely what I would want any doctor to do if the alternative was throwing away COVID vacc…
Not wasting a dose doesn't necessarily imply driving around and sticking the first person that says yes at the spot they happen to be though. e.g. standard policy could be to not open the next batch of 10 until certain conditions are met, call people on tomorrows list until you get 9 that can show up in the next 6 hours, or any other planned action. These are superior options because:
1) everything still happens in a controlled setting
2) fair distribution is still ensured
3) you're not making unrealistic demands of a person who has to give out doses every night to then drive around town without a plan
Obviously none of these are the fault of the guy taking the fall though, it's process work that needed to be done by the people that fired him and charged him. That's why the response is a bit strong, he wasn't the one that created the problem and he seemed to try to talk to anyone he could reach about a better solution. At the same time that doesn't mean this was a good outcome or what should happen.
I.e. if 9 doses have to go to waste to safely improve the distribution process as a whole it's probably better than telling doctors to independently try to take it on the road unplanned.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the flip side of it though: https://abc7news.com/california-edd-unemployment-fraud-ca-sc... $30 billion in unemployment fraud in just a year, in just one state.
"The EDD says it is working to verify the identities of people who made claims and many remain under investigation" It's identity fraud. (Entirely because of the tragic state of US [and global] privacy and state-citizen communication culture.) It's not people taking advantage of welfare and deciding to not look for work. It's career criminals.
I agree that it's career criminals, many of whom are even overseas. The problem is that these agencies have to be able to distinguish legitimate vs. fraudulent claims, and sometimes the processes they come up for doing this could be described as "jumping through hoops."