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The US wasn't a command economy in the great depression yet somehow survived. Nice strawman argument. Also it's like you didn't read the article (likely didn't

The US wasn't a command economy in the great depression yet somehow survived. Nice strawman argument. Also it's like you didn't read the article (likely didn't) that explicitly mentioned hospital admins cutting costs (the article says they're hooked on cheaper goods "like crack"), otherwise you would have seen the connection.

ch4s3 5y ago
I read the article and I'm pretty familiar with the economics of healthcare. I spent years working on projects to shift away from fee for service to value based care. My point was that hospital administrators have nothing to do with manufacturing. The people behind hospital consolidation and some of the self defeating cost cutting measures aren't responsible for there not being a supply chain starting from specialized Canadian wood pulp, to machines that make fibers and materials, all the way to finished masks. If domestic manufacturers could innovate and deliver a better/cheaper product people would buy it. It's ridiculous to think that we should have to manufacture every single important product domestically even if there are better opportunities for economically for firms and workers. We specialize for a lot of good reasons. The article has a really naive view of economics and takes an uninformed protectionist stance. for example: >To put it another way, the modern imperative of maximizing shareholder value will always put efficiency and cost over resilience. This means that the firms in question are aren't correctly pricing supply chain risk. Supply shocks will surely destroy a lot of shareholder value. But, paying too much for supplies necessarily means you have less money for things like pay, new equipment, etc. Even for goods 100% made in the US from US raw materials there were still supply disruptions. If a large percentage of all truckers and loading dock workers are sick with COVID, you still won't have the goods have and where you need them. Goods weren't unavailable simply because they were made abroad, they often were sitting unloaded in containers. There's more than a century of of economic research around protectionism and it's pretty clear that it doesn't pay off in the way it's proponents suggest. We got fucked on PPE because the stockpiles weren't maintained. The government promised the healthcare industry that ti the event of a Swine Flu like pandemic, that there would be a stockpile that they could draw from. So rationally, hospitals didn't keep their own stockpiles. The government after building up the stockpile initially, just didn't maintain it. The big problem with the buy American initiatives is that they sound nice, but are in the end just handouts to favored businesses. If you require highway projects to only use American steel for guard rails, you end up with fewer miles of highway for the same amount of money. Trying to tie corporate welfare, jobs programs, and things like infrastructure together in a single initiative is a sure way to do all three badly. We've seen this for decades. And the more domestic producers rely on the government to tip the scales, the less able they are to compete internationally. It's a lose lose, for the false promise of "resiliency".

ch4s3 5y ago

I read the article and I'm pretty familiar with the economics of healthcare. I spent years working on projects to shift away from fee for service to value based care. My point was that hospital administrators have nothing to do with manufacturing. The people behind hospital consolidation and some of the self defeating cost cutting measures aren't responsible for there not being a supply chain starting from specialized Canadian wood pulp, to machines that make fibers and materials, all the way to finished masks. If domestic manufacturers could innovate and deliver a better/cheaper product people would buy it. It's ridiculous to think that we should have to manufacture every single important product domestically even if there are better opportunities for economically for firms and workers. We specialize for a lot of good reasons. The article has a really naive view of economics and takes an uninformed protectionist stance. for example: >To put it another way, the modern imperative of maximizing shareholder value will always put efficiency and cost over resilience. This means that the firms in question are aren't correctly pricing supply chain risk. Supply shocks will surely destroy a lot of shareholder value. But, paying too much for supplies necessarily means you have less money for things like pay, new equipment, etc. Even for goods 100% made in the US from US raw materials there were still supply disruptions. If a large percentage of all truckers and loading dock workers are sick with COVID, you still won't have the goods have and where you need them. Goods weren't unavailable simply because they were made abroad, they often were sitting unloaded in containers. There's more than a century of of economic research around protectionism and it's pretty clear that it doesn't pay off in the way it's proponents suggest. We got fucked on PPE because the stockpiles weren't maintained. The government promised the healthcare industry that ti the event of a Swine Flu like pandemic, that there would be a stockpile that they could draw from. So rationally, hospitals didn't keep their own stockpiles. The government after building up the stockpile initially, just didn't maintain it. The big problem with the buy American initiatives is that they sound nice, but are in the end just handouts to favored businesses. If you require highway projects to only use American steel for guard rails, you end up with fewer miles of highway for the same amount of money. Trying to tie corporate welfare, jobs programs, and things like infrastructure together in a single initiative is a sure way to do all three badly. We've seen this for decades. And the more domestic producers rely on the government to tip the scales, the less able they are to compete internationally. It's a lose lose, for the false promise of "resiliency".