Quote:
Originally Posted by Maynard
I don't see how preventing crashing the entire hospital system counts as looking after the needs of the few. You are in denial, thinking this is just about losing grandma. True it is a modest mortality rate, but if 70% of us get it, and it has a 1% mortality rate, then we lose about 2.4 million (and with that many sick, nobody will be on a vent, so the 1% rate is even more optimistic).
But that's not the big issue. We aren't just talking about flu patients dying, it will be the whole hospital system that gets taken down. I'd rather deal with out of work people than try to live without hospitals (and I think referring to them as "homeless, destitute, no future job prospects, dying of starvation" might be a little overdramatic, if they weren't there already).
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I live in a metro city in Canada. We were paying tens of dollars per month per person for healthcare. However, we get what we pay for. People here wait 1-2 years for an mri and 2+ years for any surgery requiring a specialist. A family physician's main job is to prescribe treatments for symptoms (not a solution) and to defer people until they are close to deaths bed. There's a minimum of a 3-4 hour wait when going to emergency no matter the time of day. A few weeks ago, we had 20-30 people in BC who were hospitalized due to covid-19 and the alarm bells rang that we were at max capacity (an exaggeration but not far off from the truth). I'm not trying to make light of your situation in NY but a lot of places already have collapsed/dysfunctional healthcare systems and people's mentalities are relative to what they are accustomed to. Do you know why we have this problem here in Canada? It's because doctors get their education subsidized here and then move to the states to get paid what they deserve. It's going to take an economic solution to fix the healthcare system here. Everywhere in the modern world there are a lot of people who already don't have the safety-net of a working healthcare system who would feel that it is more important to provide for their standard of living than it is to sacrifice for the sake of health and longevity. It's all relative until someone steps back and looks at the broader problem.