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It wasn't their health care resources, it was the lack of immediate action.
I'd say we have to wait until this thing has played out before we start throwing out wild theories.
We have no clue what the end result is going to be in the USA.
You wake up with 12 people infected in your state and go to bed with 28 infected....and more than half of those come from community spread with no knowledge of contact to travel to China or Italy.
Until last week, the Italian public health care system had the capacity to care for everyone. Our country has universal health care, so patients aren’t turned away from hospitals here. But in a matter of days, the system was being felled by a virus that I, and many other Italians, had failed to take seriously.
The inability of the medical system to deal with the flow of patients in critical condition is not one of the problems of this complex medical emergency. It is the problem. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As a journalist, I had read, heard, and spoken to several experts explaining that the most immediate threat of Covid-19 was the hospital system becoming overwhelmed, and therefore the most pressing need was to avoid too many people getting sick at the same time, as resources are limited.
Why are resources limited? I assume because they chose to spend a certain amount of money on what they thought was reasonable. Obviously in normal circumstances you would not want to provide facilities that could house every single person if they got sick at one time. That would be overkill.
So now that CV-19 has overwhelmed them...
An anesthesiologist at a hospital in Bergamo, one of the cities with the most cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, told the paper that the intensive care unit was already at capacity, and doctors were being forced to start making difficult triage decisions, admitting people who desperately need mechanical ventilation based on age, life expectancy, and other factors. Just like in wartime.
...
The same day, I heard from a manager in the Lombardy health care system, among the most advanced and well-funded in Europe, that he saw anesthesiologists weeping in the hospital hallways because of the choices they are going to have to make.
As of Friday - 1,266 people died in Italy. I am not sure if they were all old or compromised in their health.
The reason I say that universal health does not work is because all of their eggs are in one basket.
There are people there who can afford to pay for their own care. There should be private, "for profit" places to go where people who want to pay for their own care can do so. What that does it take some of the strain off of hospitals who do work for the government.
The article also goes into detail about the government and the doctors were slow to respond - and how that could have helped the situation.
According to Wikipedia - under normal circumstances, wait times for services range from a few weeks to a few months. If wait times are that long under normal circumstances, there is no way the can handle something like CV-19 that overwhelms them in a short time frame.
People with enough money can pick and choose their healthcare in every country on the planet. Such people are a fairly small minority and will not have much impact on the amount of beds available through a public healthcare system.
Let's say that a private, for profit hospital and a publicly funded hospital are built side by side. Since the first hospital is concerned mainly with making money for its investors, it will maintain a bed count that is no higher than necessary. Empty beds hurt the bottom line, so this hospital has only 400 beds. The public hospital serves a much larger population of patients while funding is kept as low as it can while still serving the local community. This second hospital has 4,000 beds.
Everything runs smoothly until a massive pandemic suddenly strikes and 8,000 beds are required to treat the surge in gravely ill and dying patients. The sick millionaires flock to the private hospital taking all of their private beds. This leaves the public hospital with a need for 7,600 beds, but since they only have 4,000, the public hospital comes up 3,600 beds short. Those 6,400 desperately ill people are not going to live just because there are 400 private beds out there which they couldn't afford anyhow. Just because an intensive care unit or a hospital ward becomes overwhelmed during a major epidemic hardly means that we should give up on a public healthcare system.
That's not what the story in the Boston Globe said anyhow. If you'd read through to the end of the article, the author was suggesting that people stay home in order to avoid becoming ill in the first place. That's a far cry from saying public health care can't work.
Until last week, the Italian public health care system had the capacity to care for everyone. Our country has universal health care, so patients aren’t turned away from hospitals here. But in a matter of days, the system was being felled by a virus that I, and many other Italians, had failed to take seriously.
The inability of the medical system to deal with the flow of patients in critical condition is not one of the problems of this complex medical emergency. It is the problem. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As a journalist, I had read, heard, and spoken to several experts explaining that the most immediate threat of Covid-19 was the hospital system becoming overwhelmed, and therefore the most pressing need was to avoid too many people getting sick at the same time, as resources are limited.
Why are resources limited? I assume because they chose to spend a certain amount of money on what they thought was reasonable. Obviously in normal circumstances you would not want to provide facilities that could house every single person if they got sick at one time. That would be overkill.
So now that CV-19 has overwhelmed them...
An anesthesiologist at a hospital in Bergamo, one of the cities with the most cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, told the paper that the intensive care unit was already at capacity, and doctors were being forced to start making difficult triage decisions, admitting people who desperately need mechanical ventilation based on age, life expectancy, and other factors. Just like in wartime.
...
The same day, I heard from a manager in the Lombardy health care system, among the most advanced and well-funded in Europe, that he saw anesthesiologists weeping in the hospital hallways because of the choices they are going to have to make.
As of Friday - 1,266 people died in Italy. I am not sure if they were all old or compromised in their health.
The reason I say that universal health does not work is because all of their eggs are in one basket.
There are people there who can afford to pay for their own care. There should be private, "for profit" places to go where people who want to pay for their own care can do so. What that does it take some of the strain off of hospitals who do work for the government.
The article also goes into detail about the government and the doctors were slow to respond - and how that could have helped the situation.
According to Wikipedia - under normal circumstances, wait times for services range from a few weeks to a few months. If wait times are that long under normal circumstances, there is no way the can handle something like CV-19 that overwhelms them in a short time frame.
There was a guy on the teevee tonight who said that Medicare for all "Would not solve the problem at all."
Quote:
“With all due respect to Medicare for All, you have a single payer system in Italy. It doesn't work there. It has nothing to do with Medicare for All. That would not solve the problem at all,” Biden said.
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(set 1 day ago)
Location: Great Britain
27,166 posts, read 13,455,286 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DRob4JC
They didn't come to that conclusion that universal healthcare is not good, but I am.
The reason I say that universal health does not work is because all of their eggs are in one basket.
There are people there who can afford to pay for their own care. There should be private, "for profit" places to go where people who want to pay for their own care can do so. What that does it take some of the strain off of hospitals who do work for the government.
The article also goes into detail about the government and the doctors were slow to respond - and how that could have helped the situation.
According to Wikipedia - under normal circumstances, wait times for services range from a few weeks to a few months. If wait times are that long under normal circumstances, there is no way the can handle something like CV-19 that overwhelms them in a short time frame.
Most Universal systems were developed out of war time emergency systems amd man countries are now putting in place war trime measures.
In terms of private hospitals they will be commandeered in times of national emergency and some hotels will also be used, whilst the economy will change footing including an emphasis on manufacturing much needed items. Most countries are now on a war like footing.
As for the system before universal healthcare, it was mainly voluntary charirable hospitals for the poor, who would not admit those who could pay. Most of the system in such circumstanes ewas geared towards the very wealthy.
Many Americans also seem to forget that countries such as Italy and Britain had private and charity healthcare systems prior to developing universal systems, and they were not popular, hence Churchill' 1945 election defeat following WW2. This was mainly due to people wanting significant Social Change.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wellcome Collection
Healthcare before the NHS
In 1945, shortly after the war in Europe had drawn to a close, Clement Attlee led the Labour Party to a shock landslide victory over Churchill’s Conservatives, and set about transforming Beveridge’s vision of a welfare state into reality. A major component of this was the creation of a universal health service, available to all and for free. Aneurin Bevan, a prominent socialist and the son of a miner, was tasked with spearheading its creation.
Up until this point, healthcare had consisted of an uneven patchwork of services that varied widely by region.
‘Voluntary’ hospitals, aimed at the ‘sick poor’, provided the bulk of emergency care and relied largely on charity. They were staffed by physicians and surgeons who donated their time and expertise while making a living from their private practice. Municipal hospitals, a vestige of the old workhouse hospitals created under the Poor Laws, were run by local authorities.
Upper- and middle-class patients were barred from these public wards on the basis that it was an abuse of charity, and expected to pay. In return they received greater privacy and a higher standard of care. Some hospitals ran more successfully than others, but by the 1930s hospitals across the country were facing financial crisis and growing waiting lists.
Status:
"Smartened up and walked away!"
(set 25 days ago)
11,780 posts, read 5,792,331 times
Reputation: 14201
The idiocracy of some of these statements annoy the heck out of me. Mach is assuming that everyone tested gets the correct results and not a false negative because the symptoms weren't bad enough. I think he is then assuming that person goes immediately home - having no contact or touching anything which may be carrying the virus.
As fearful as people are - they aren't smart. Standing in grocery store lines for 45 minutes to get groceries surrounded by everyone and their brother who may be carrying the disease.
I didn't think that 45,000 sounded right. The U.S. number is from 2009. Do the math - 3.47 million beds in 2009.
Your math is off.
With a population rounded up to 310 million and per captive of 34.7 beds per capita, you come with around 104,100 beds in 2009.
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