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Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

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Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#361

Post by Griffinsauce »

makomk wrote: post #343
oliwarner wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babysitting? These are patients deemed medically unfit enough to bring in. Who's looking after them after they're turfed out the ambulance? Every bed in every bay in A&E is occupied, each with an allocated nursing provision. Oh we just double the number of nurses? Yeah, but no. They don't grow on trees. The current ones don't stretch (we asked). You can't just absorb 20-40 patients into your acute departments without…

I don't really see how patients so severely ill that they need a bed in A&E with dedicated nursing provision could be discharged into community social care, though maybe I'm missing something...

Discharge the less ill people, free up a bed for the more ill ones.

It's all about throughput. You're only looking at the front while the problem is in the back.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#362

Post by trs8080 »

WalterBright wrote: post #359
trs8080 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they remain mired in poverty largely because the US keeps meddling in their affairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... So it's more like "they remain mired in poverty because of the United States' predilection for predatory capitalism."

How about this: "Argentina’s Long Road to Ruin A century’s worth of corruption and leftist politics devastated this once-rich nation." https://www.wsj.com/articles/argentinas-long-road-to-ruin-hy...

Yes, the US had its hand in Argentina as well - they supported the violent military junta that saw Peron overthrown and leftist journalists and activists murdered by the thousands during the Dirty War. When I was studying there, the family I stayed with had relatives who had been abducted and "disappeared," which was such a widespread phenomenon under the right wing government that they have a name: "Los Desaparecidos". Here's a Wikipedia article about how the CIA contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#Argentina

Also, your article is unfortunately paywalled, but an op-ed from someone at the WSJ isn't going to change my mind.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#363

Post by WalterBright »

trs8080 wrote: post #362
WalterBright wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this: "Argentina’s Long Road to Ruin A century’s worth of corruption and leftist politics devastated this once-rich nation." https://www.wsj.com/articles/argentinas-long-road-to-ruin-hy...

Yes, the US had its hand in Argentina as well - they supported the violent military junta that saw Peron overthrown and leftist journalists and activists murdered by the thousands during the Dirty War. When I was studying there, the family I stayed with had relatives who had been abducted and "disappeared," which was such a widespread phenomenon under the right wing government that they have a name: "Los Desaparecido…

> Operation Condor

ended 40 years ago. The article I cited is today.

> but an op-ed from someone at the WSJ isn't going to change my mind

Not very open-minded to close your mind to something you haven't read. Do you know what is happening to Argentina today?

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#364

Post by WalterBright »

fractallyte wrote: post #320
WalterBright wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same goes for South America. Yet they remain mired in poverty thanks to their predilection for socialism.

Much of that poverty has its roots way back in the time of the Conquistadors and the generations of Spanish and Portuguese families that looted the riches of the Inca empire. The descendants of those families still have huge wealth and influence in South America.

The wealth generated by free markets has no need of Inca wealth.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#365

Post by WalterBright »

anigbrowl wrote: post #313
WalterBright wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is beholden to the public as its shareholders. Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation. Every one. > The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible. True, but the way to get that money is to please the customer, because the company cannot force them to buy.

Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation. Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.

Nobody advocates for government run food production because it is impossible to convince people they aren't starving when they are.

That's why it's the poster boy for socialism's failures.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#366

Post by WalterBright »

asdff wrote: post #312
WalterBright wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is beholden to the public as its shareholders. Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation. Every one. > The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible. True, but the way to get that money is to please the customer, because the company cannot force them to buy.

Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer. I'm sure nicotine addicts get a lot of pleasure from smoking a pack a day. In fact i think that is still Newport's slogan. Plus your quip is a little bit dated honestly. The soviets had famines because they literally didn't support evolution for quite some time. They believed Lysenko and allowed him to execute his critics. Meanwhile today, look at China the p…

> Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer.

Ah, the arrogance of knowing what is best for others. (Of course, I know what's best for everyone else, too, but my arrogance stops at taking the next step of being entitled to force it on them.)

> The soviets

You can make excuses for the Soviets. But you gotta explain the starvation from every other communist country. The starvation in Jamestown when they tried communist agriculture. The starvation in the Pilgrims' first year when they tried communist food production. The failure of the Kibbutzen in Israel to feed themselves without government subsidy.

It goes on and on.

P.S. China stopped starving when the stopped collectivist agriculture.

Now for the flip side. Which was the first country to eliminate famine? The US, around 1800, with free market agriculture. Next, which free market agricultural system has suffered from a famine?

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#367

Post by WalterBright »

anigbrowl wrote: post #311
WalterBright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the seller, in a free market, has to please is customer. The way to please the customer is to have the customer benefit from the transaction. For example, how long do you think McDonald's would last if its McBurgers tasted bad? McDonald's success is extremely tied to customer satisfaction. Tossing the ball back to you, under socialism, why would the socialist service care if you're pleased with the service or…

McDonalds is able to sell garbage food because most Americans are addicted to sugar. Your free-market evangelism is the economic equivalent of their junk food.

I enjoy a meal at McD's regularly. I just have a QP, I never buy shakes or soft drinks. The QP is healthy food.

Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#368

Post by WalterBright »

Teever wrote: post #352
WalterBright wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is difficult to understand how it works, but the beauty of the free market is everyone benefits while selfishly working for their own self-interest. Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.

The driving force between market capitalism isn't selfishness Walter. It's competition. People innately like to compete and will do so over the dumbest things, like who can get the little puck in the net with sticks the most, or who can correctly guess the sum of a pair of dice. Market capitalism coopts this most basic of human instincts,not greed, and selfish greed is actually the root of many failures of capitalism…

Nah, it's selfishness.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#369

Post by StanislavPetrov »

fencepost wrote: post #289
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite of what you'd be doing if you wanted the system to function correctly... But what if you didn't? Because you wanted to replace it, but it was dangerous to say that out loud? The Conservatives (and to some extent some Liberals as well) have been playing a long game -- since the 70s when it was introduced -- to get rid of medicare. It's incredibly popular with Canadians as a whole, but if you take con…

Hey, if you object to privatizing healthcare, why do you hate the free market? Don't you think that private healthcare and insurance companies should be able to skim billions of dollars off the top of all health-related spending? Are you some kind of commie?

>Don't you think that private healthcare and insurance companies should be able to skim billions of dollars off the top of all health-related spending?

The drug companies and medical supply companies already do that whether or not healthcare is "private". We need a massive overhaul of the patent system if we ever want to bring down the cost of healthcare.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#370

Post by fragmede »

WalterBright wrote: post #227
asdff wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can people benefit when in the free market system consumers are seen as a resource to be exploited?

Because the seller, in a free market, has to please is customer. The way to please the customer is to have the customer benefit from the transaction. For example, how long do you think McDonald's would last if its McBurgers tasted bad? McDonald's success is extremely tied to customer satisfaction. Tossing the ball back to you, under socialism, why would the socialist service care if you're pleased with the service or…

Well, socialism isn't communism, and money still exists under socialism, so if the service center isn't doing their job, then, as you capitalists like to say, money talks.

Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would be no such thing as conmen or MLM scams, and every consumer would be 100% informed and perfectly rational. That's ridiculous, so the government needs to step in at times, to promote a freer market than one without regulation.

Go eat at a restaurant in Times Square. They exist only because of their location, and the fact that tourists don't stay long. So their food is bad AND they don't need to try and harder because it doesn't hurt their business. They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.

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