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To me, the most striking thing about the interview is his idea for just fixing the Covid testing delays. I think he puts his finger right on the problem: we're

To me, the most striking thing about the interview is his idea for just fixing the Covid testing delays. I think he puts his finger right on the problem: we're incentivizing essentially worthless tests by paying full price. Change the reimbursement structure and capitalism will do its job. I'd like to understand more deeply why this is not happening.

Upvoter33 6y ago
You don't have to understand very much to know that the Trump administration has made so many wrong turns on this issue. This is just a small part of their stupidity, and it has cost the US thousands of lives, and a much longer road to recovery. November can't come soon enough.
- raphlinus 6y ago
  The dysfunction of the US healthcare system predates the Trump administration by a lot. I consider blaming Trump a shallow explanation of what's going wrong. Why are other leaders doing such a poor job articulating the way forward? Why aren't governors getting together and doing all they can to work around the obvious failures of the federal response?
bleepblorp 6y ago
I think the basic problem with the American COVID-19 response is that US elites haven't faced a real crisis for so long that they don't have the institutional knowledge to know how to respond to a national-level crisis that can't be treated as a political problem. Since WWII, the crises faced by the US have been small enough that American elites have been able to politically neutralize them with a combination of half-measures and concerted efforts to mold public opinion to shift blame onto disfavored groups, such as 'liberals,' urbanites, non-Christians, and/or non-Americans. Until COVID-19, it's seldom been politically necessary for America's elites to actually do something about America's crises as opposed to making sure that someone else takes the blame for them. COVID-19 is different. It is a global-scale disaster that requires a competent national response and can't be politically neutralized because viruses aren't political actors. American elites, however, have no experience with this kind of crisis and have been unable to respond to it as anything but a political problem and, worse, as a source for graft. The results have been an abject failure in terms of lives lost, health lost, and economic damage. (This is not a problem unique to the US. I have seen some comparative politics research that found a strong co-relation between poor national-level COVID-19 responses and the depth of internal political divisions. I speculate that highly divided societies make blame shifting by elites a favorable strategy for crisis response and erode the ability of elites to respond to real crises.)
raziel2p 6y ago
Considering Trump has said things like "slow down the testing" but at the same time bragging about how the US does more tests than anywhere else in the world, it's hard to say. Maybe allowing tests with weeks of delay means they can test more, or at least inflate the numbers? Again, incentives are in the wrong place.

Upvoter33 6y ago

You don't have to understand very much to know that the Trump administration has made so many wrong turns on this issue. This is just a small part of their stupidity, and it has cost the US thousands of lives, and a much longer road to recovery. November can't come soon enough.

raphlinus 6y ago
The dysfunction of the US healthcare system predates the Trump administration by a lot. I consider blaming Trump a shallow explanation of what's going wrong. Why are other leaders doing such a poor job articulating the way forward? Why aren't governors getting together and doing all they can to work around the obvious failures of the federal response?

bleepblorp 6y ago

I think the basic problem with the American COVID-19 response is that US elites haven't faced a real crisis for so long that they don't have the institutional knowledge to know how to respond to a national-level crisis that can't be treated as a political problem. Since WWII, the crises faced by the US have been small enough that American elites have been able to politically neutralize them with a combination of half-measures and concerted efforts to mold public opinion to shift blame onto disfavored groups, such as 'liberals,' urbanites, non-Christians, and/or non-Americans. Until COVID-19, it's seldom been politically necessary for America's elites to actually do something about America's crises as opposed to making sure that someone else takes the blame for them. COVID-19 is different. It is a global-scale disaster that requires a competent national response and can't be politically neutralized because viruses aren't political actors. American elites, however, have no experience with this kind of crisis and have been unable to respond to it as anything but a political problem and, worse, as a source for graft. The results have been an abject failure in terms of lives lost, health lost, and economic damage. (This is not a problem unique to the US. I have seen some comparative politics research that found a strong co-relation between poor national-level COVID-19 responses and the depth of internal political divisions. I speculate that highly divided societies make blame shifting by elites a favorable strategy for crisis response and erode the ability of elites to respond to real crises.)

raziel2p 6y ago

Considering Trump has said things like "slow down the testing" but at the same time bragging about how the US does more tests than anywhere else in the world, it's hard to say. Maybe allowing tests with weeks of delay means they can test more, or at least inflate the numbers? Again, incentives are in the wrong place.