America Rarely Faces This Kind of a Threat

The title of this essay by Mark Sumner really caught my attention.

America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should never be a for-profit business

I first saw it on Crooks and Liars and have linked back to Kos where it seemed to have been first published. It is a very strong indictment of all that wonderful "efficiency" and "disruption" that has been imposed on America by profit-maximizing corporations for decades now. Especially our ramshackle healthcare industry has taken cost-cutting and productivity enhancement to such an extreme that the system is running at near capacity in normal times because that is how to maximize profits. Needless to say it is extremely fragile and operates with almost no margin for error.

Sumner contrasts the "super-lean, infinite-sigma healthcare system, absolutely dependent on every cog remaining in place" operating principle of corporate medicine with NASA's joke about "all the components being built by the lowest bidder" but notes that spacecraft have redundant systems built in all over them while hospitals walk a tightrope of "just-in-time" deliveries and nurses worked to exhaustion. It's a system designed to fold up with the smallest amount of stress on it. Somehow republicans claim that our healthcare system is the best in the world and people don't want to change their plan. No amount of protest or lobbying by mere mortals who get sick seems to penetrate the corporate armor or into Congress.

Previous outbreaks of disease allowed some sporadic improvements and plans to get through in public systems but the private healthcare industry balk at any attempts to increase their costs for such silly reasons as people dying or emergencies that might never materialize. Digby made a note that doughfacedonny and the other cynical bastards made real hay out of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 that had my mother-in-law so worried.

From all reports, the president is extremely unhappy with this turn of events, primarily because he believes it could interfere with his re-election. It’s easy to see why he thinks that: He and his Republican friends worked hard to gin up the Ebola outbreak into a national panic in 2014, and there’s good evidence that it had an effect on the outcome of the midterm elections that year, when the GOP made major gains.

But this time we don’t have a competent administration in charge to deal with the actual crisis while gadflies like Trump and Fox News play political games. Just as he has corrupted the DOJ and the director of national intelligence’s office, purging the ranks of experts and professionals by any means necessary, so too he has degraded the nation’s public health system, first and foremost by firing the White House pandemic response team and cutting the CDC’s efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks by 80%.

As I understand it, cutting CDC funding and the pandemic response team was a priority because President Obama had those things and everything the black guy did has to go. Besides, there are corporate tax cuts to pay for. Public health be damned. Digby also linked to this article in the Pacific Standard magazine that found correlation between republican fear-mongering over Ebola and their election gains in 2014. The research found that fear made people more likely to vote for conservative candidates. If there is anything I want for Christmas, it is the fact that republicans are not conservative to go mainstream. These are authoritarians, an actual conservative would not be interested in corporate "disruption" and "efficiency" that lead to instability. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

Another thing an actual conservative understands is that disasters happen, and when you are entrusted with public office it is your responsibility to serve the public to the best of your ability. I just saw a comment, "does anyone else get the feeling that the trump administration isn't taking the Coronavirus seriously?" in response to Mick Mulvaney the chief of staff whining about how the media was portraying doughfacedonny's shortcomings. What an understatement. Digby noted in her article that donny's primary concern is his reelection and money. CNN's Matt Egan relayed Goldman Sachs "concerns" that Coronavirus might endanger that reelection and money but now that Bernie Sanders has the premature triumphalism of being the frontrunner that all the capitalists can rest easy. So while donny has been working hard finding excuses to visit his properties on your dime, spending an entire third of his term there, the rest of his henchmen are hard at work censoring experts who could inform the public.

Unlike the rest of the world, America has been relatively insulated and privileged to have avoided invasions of either foreign soldiers or pathogens. This is why, in my opinion, our corporate and republican elites take such a cavalier attitude towards preparedness. A nation that was aware that outside threats are more varied than a terror attack would not run a trillion dollar deficit in a "peacetime" and "full employment" economy. It never fails to amaze me how much tunnel vision our corporate executive overlords have. On the one hand every management buzzword traces back to "disrupt!" but this seems to only pertain to causing as much insecurity and instability as possible for workers and families. Stretching supply chains all over the world, leaving deliveries to the magic of "just in time" manufacturing, and concentrating so much power in the hands of monopolist companies that don't really compete and therefore don't care about real disruption is a recipe for disaster. The American system of manufacturing used to be about interchangeable parts, logical progression of assembly on moving lines, and precision machinery. Now it is, as Mark Sumner wrote extensively in his essay, all about running things at the edge of failure with no margin of error on purpose because that is how investors can maximize profits.

Running heathcare like this is absolutely ludicrous. If hospitals and clinics are stressed to the breaking point in normal times, the smallest disruption will cause cascading failures at every point. Real disruption, like an epidemic or concerted terror campaigns, will in short order completely collapse American society. The executives know this and run their calcified, unwieldy monopolies lean and fragile anyway. Why? Partially because they have to answer to that shady group of a$$holes called "investors" who always push for more. Catastrophes are unusual, rare occurrences... and someone else's problem. When Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street parasites collapsed the housing market in 2008, someone else became the American taxpayer. They screwed us all both ways and got away with it, Uncle Sam came to their rescue and asked for nothing in return. Executives as a class expect the same pampering every time they collapse the economy but what happens when Uncle Sam has been hollowed out and sabotaged by republicans?

Wash your hands, avoid crowds, take vitamins, and do everything you can to protect yourself and your family because we're on our own.