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Scaling up healthcare is not a matter of spinning up a new EC2 instance. We run health care at a level that can cope with normal situations, but would fail inst

Scaling up healthcare is not a matter of spinning up a new EC2 instance. We run health care at a level that can cope with normal situations, but would fail instantly in the case of say civil war or alien invasion. That's a choice, as a society we'd rather spend the resources on youtube videos of rich people yelling at the camera than on more doctors, and that's fine, freedom. It gets worse though, you can 'overclock' your healthcare system in a time of crisis, but that leads to burning out your machines, and thus ending up with less capacity afterwards. Generally the west has run our healthcare systems beyond 100% for nearly 2 years, and that means capacity has actually decreased. All the money in the world won't fix that in a short time - indeed it can make it worse in some cases (If you gave a nurse $1m to work 16 hour shifts for the 30 days, he would, and then he'd likely quit) If you want to improve your healthcare situation, you need to go back in time 10 years and get more people training to work in healthcare. That means fewer people working in advertising or other key parts of the economy.

johnchristopher 5y ago
> That means fewer people working in advertising or other key parts of the economy. I see what you did there :). Anyway, ~10 years ago I considered moving back to school for a nurse degree. I didn't and one of the reason was that I had not enough energy in me to fight for the degree and to fight the social and welfare system for the right to do it. Edit: It's a key part of the society and the promise of fulfilling rewards is great but the system doesn't like you. It glorifies your pain. That's why I don't believe most nurses and health care workers who got out will ever get back as nurses. Maybe as medical secretaries or logistics but they won't get back in the trenches.
gus_massa 5y ago
One of the reasons why you can't overclock the health system is that medical doctors and nurses are doing insane long shift, like 12 hours or even 24 hours. The official reason is that they must be used to long shift, so in case of a big emergency they can work long shifts. The problem is that once the big emergency arrives, you don't have spared professionals, because you don't need them because they are overclocked in normal times. Another reason is that the shift change is dangerous because they have a lot of info in their mind that is not transmitted to the member of the next shift. This can be solved if they log all the data in some common system, but it's difficult to convince the doctors to follow a checklist during surgery. (Pilots following checklist avoid a lot of plane crashes.) (Each time a new doctor arrives, remember to tell him/her all the relevant info, don't assume the last doctor passed the info.) If you want to be prepared for the next pandemic, make 6 hours shift mandatory. They will have an easy time fpr the next 90 years. Health care will be more expensive. Make a good shift change procedure. Once the next pandemic arrive, you can easily overclock the staff x2, increase the pay x3 to keep them happy, and call the heroes too.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> That means fewer people working in advertising or other key parts of the economy. I see what you did there :). Anyway, ~10 years ago I considered moving back to school for a nurse degree. I didn't and one of the reason was that I had not enough energy in me to fight for the degree and to fight the social and welfare system for the right to do it. Edit: It's a key part of the society and the promise of fulfilling rewards is great but the system doesn't like you. It glorifies your pain. That's why I don't believe most nurses and health care workers who got out will ever get back as nurses. Maybe as medical secretaries or logistics but they won't get back in the trenches.

gus_massa 5y ago

One of the reasons why you can't overclock the health system is that medical doctors and nurses are doing insane long shift, like 12 hours or even 24 hours. The official reason is that they must be used to long shift, so in case of a big emergency they can work long shifts. The problem is that once the big emergency arrives, you don't have spared professionals, because you don't need them because they are overclocked in normal times. Another reason is that the shift change is dangerous because they have a lot of info in their mind that is not transmitted to the member of the next shift. This can be solved if they log all the data in some common system, but it's difficult to convince the doctors to follow a checklist during surgery. (Pilots following checklist avoid a lot of plane crashes.) (Each time a new doctor arrives, remember to tell him/her all the relevant info, don't assume the last doctor passed the info.) If you want to be prepared for the next pandemic, make 6 hours shift mandatory. They will have an easy time fpr the next 90 years. Health care will be more expensive. Make a good shift change procedure. Once the next pandemic arrive, you can easily overclock the staff x2, increase the pay x3 to keep them happy, and call the heroes too.