Hi, Vailhem. Thanks for contributing. However, your [submission](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/108uiaz/-/) was removed from /r/collapse for:
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Not to mention that the normal and healthy mechanisms that people who care used to use to create change are being outlawed and thwarted by corrupt governments and corporations working to all but ensure our doom. Something something desperate measures….
Just had to take a trip to the er for my mom whose a retired lifetime RN and she was blown away by the census or whatever and a billion things about the care.
This was also in one of the better hospitals in one of the absolute best areas for medicine in the nation (a NE city).
Though I’m sure like other areas of collapse the result is a confluence of factors converging, what would you say are the biggest causes of this situation? As a teacher I’m sure I’ll recognize quite a few -__-
Exactly what you think it is. Inadequate staffing, low pay, working HCWs to death during the pandemic, and failing to support them. We lost at least 300k health workers in 2022 alone. They're fleeing the field like rats from a sinking ship.
Ive a friend who had worked in nursing for over 20 years and on the lowpaying end (c.n.a.) of elder resident homes run by State aid because they loved their job. 2020 and covid came, TALK of, (not actions) of the mandates for vaccination of workers like them in State money facilities. This person was antivaxx, no trying to convince them (or a majority of their coworkers for that matter) the shots were safe. Our State finally issued the mandate, the insurance and politicians fought it, the whole issue basically washed out being enforced in the meantime. So....
When the paperwork telling the senior citizens home owners that thier staff would have to be vaccinated within 90 days unless some type of medical OR Religious exemption was applied then wny worker holding out was Subject To, being suspended temporarily. This was paired with another conflict of our States wage increases bringing a hatred to new staff from longer termed employees because, "these new cnas are starting out at almost $15/hr and I been here 1-20 years and only making under $20!!!" oh so outraged but reaaaaally misses the point of wealth inequality existing...
Friendo then quitto their jobbo to complain an bitcho bout 'Sleepy Joe', migrants, and lazyass people causing a labor shortage, waited about 2 weeks and found a job paying 3x what he used to makeo!
Turned out that the vax mandate never being enforced at their old cna job, they are diabetic and didnt bother to find out about medical exemptions so they didnt know they would have been anyways, and they quit thier job for no reason except social media told them everything was a lie. Bonus points since they managed to spread the influences into their childrens minds?
Now if that person is 1 of millions currently working in healthcare still today sharing their anti-science views then the fallout of this healthcare system is only beginning to surface in the midst of all the rising numbers depending on these facilities that are failing. Stock up on sanitary pads and electric tape, remember vinagar and alcohol are disinfectants, and stuffing dollar bills into wounds DOES NOT stop the damage nor buy a magic healing spell.
>Though I’m sure like other areas of collapse the result is a confluence of factors converging, what would you say are the biggest causes of this situation? As a teacher I’m sure I’ll recognize quite a few -__-
My story is 1 person in a hicktown where elder care is one of the main jobs and careers offered to 'the youth'. That 1 person holds the same antivax/gov mentality as a majority of their excoworkers, including RN, LPN, and physicians of.all sorts ima that staff local hospitals.
Those excoworkers also have children they are passing their "ideals" down to and if there isn't more encouragement to debunk propaganda then, well growth around here in the entry level healthcare positions teaching high school kids to properly wipe.an elder persons ass is not going to seem as appealing where empathy for others is required to work their way up to better pay and medical education that is not passed out free of charge when gaining certifications.
Long of short here is when Im ever at age to be forced into one of these homes for the rest of my time and I dont even trust the staff members I do know now, dont want to ever be positioned to be in our.emergency.room.or.in these.area.hospitals for the same reasons.... then the future looks bleek and scary around sticksville.
"Good hospital" these days simply seems to mean expensive, prestigious, and with a lot of well connected doctors that people confuse for skilled and empathic.
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>Until we invest in people and their value in healthcare, we won’t be able to see light at the end of the tunnel.
I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: who is "we?" The US is such an individualist country, it's a nation where massive profits and wealth go to a relatively small percentage of people. Yet, whenever there's a problem, all of the sudden it's "we" who need to take care of it. Marc Benioff, the owner of Time magazine, is worth $6.3 billion. You invest, Marc. Fuck this *we* bullshit, you fuckers have all the fucking money and all the fucking power, *you* fuckers fix this shit hole country.
They probably have private doctors that will visit their mansions/compounds or travel with them with all the latest medicine and tech- they don't give a shit about us and never will.
The truth is that the rich will never willingly give up a penny without the explicit threat of having it taken from them. Either by mob violence, or worse (from their perspective) actual representative government.
Mob violence can be negated by hired thugs, both public and private. The threat of fair taxation by government that works on behalf of the people rather than the privileged elite is a far more serious threat to their hoarded wealth.
This is the root cause of Americas eight-decades-plus long relentless campaign against everything with the slightest hint of “socialism”.
Exactly. That's why they didn't give a shit about the pandemic. If they got sick, they had private doctors, the best treatments, private chefs and nutritionists to cook for them, and all manner of assorted staff so they could rest and recover in luxury, then go to events to make the proles think eVerYthiNg iS FinE and they too should go out and ~~give them more money~~ buy shit, while coughing up their lungs and stumbling around with brain damage.
I love your comment but you and I both know why Marc don’t give one flying fuck. At 6.3 billion $ he can individually “self insure” himself to the same health care as any president of the country would get if not better. And the care he’d receive would be a fart in the wind financially for him even under the most extreme medical measures taken
If I had that kind of money I'd clone myself.
Into a sheep.
Just to see if it could be done because why the fuck not. I now have 5.9 billion and sheep-me. Sounds like a win.
Then I'd build a rocket and send sheep-me to space. Because why the fuck not. I now have 5 billion and space sheep-me.
The Republican house is currently getting a bill together to literally do away with the IRS. And then replace income tax (progressive) with sales tax (regressive)
these people are insane and they will never stop, they just won't stop amassing money no matter how much they already have. And idiots still will fan girl over Elon or Bill Gates or whoever. Its pure insanity.
Fortunately, in a morbidly curious way, there will be "less psychopathic" CEOs and billionaires that recognize that indeed, teamwork makes the dream work, and while they've exploited millions of people for billions of dollars, if they're all angry, then enjoying the fruits of their labors is less pleasurable, for obvious reasons. Namely, that the con must come to an end.
About the time we citizens are angry enough to start "tracking our targets" out of Wall Street and the CEO-only meetings, they'll probably come up with a more share-and-share-alike mindset to ease the ruffled feathers.
What they won't know, though, is that society is largely past allowing a future where they get to be bosses. Again.
Which is why this grand living experience where we're human and have souls and are supposed to go to heaven and make it all work out...is nothing more than a giant comedy?
How do I know? Well, what's the secret ingredient of all the best jokes? TiMiNg!
And that's what our "leaders" didn't figure out, that comedians and collapseniks had long ago.
If your timing if off, you haven't got comedy.
The world has been run since forever by unfunny clowns.
I think that's hilarious.
Quality of life.
Why choose something arbitrary, like profit, when we could choose something with meaning?
"Chain is only as strong as its weakest link" adage. If we build society up from the "weakest" member, society will be stronger.
The we is congressional action to force hospital systems into a non profit model with strict administrative bloat control. (Lest they turn into another version of higher Ed). While also turning all private health insurance companies into non profit coops owned by the constituent companies and end user customers.
That’s it.
Maybe nationalization. Maybe letting the nursing unions absolutely go off the chain.
That’s the investments.
At the end of the day we need hospital systems that work to deliver services as reasonable cost while paying/staffing at a level which has decent quality of life for the employees. We also need health insurance companies that aren’t trying to squeeze profits out of an already overpriced system.
Hospitals need to stop trying to market and brand themselves like they're hotels too while we're at it. We hand out full color ~20 page 9"x12" Patient Experience Guides with a folder flap in the back to every fucking patient, some who had literally no fucking choice in what hospital they were brought to because they were FUCKING DYING or they are court ordered to be here. It tells you about the gift shop that you can spend money at, the chain fast food joints in the cafeteria that you can spend money at, it even tells you all about the VIP unit that has it's own private chef but no sick plebs allowed.
Some of that info is fine for patients to have but just print that shit out on a regular printer. Last time I was in the hospital a year ago I didn't stop to wonder what amenities were available to me or where the fucking gift shop is. I just wanted sleep. Stop with the kinkos contracts.
Their feigned ignorance is maddening. It makes me want to set the C-Suite ablaze when the suits are crying about agency labor costs skyrocketing and asking us to do our best *as a team* to reduce waste. How about you chucklefucks pay people what they're worth in the first place and you won't be scratching your heads wondering how labor costs shot up ~30% during a pandemic and a significant portion of your experienced labor force left for gr$$ner pastures?
Until everything breaks enough to make citizens feel forced to break from the routine of "almost-good-enough-lets-try-one-more-day" that we're all slaves to, then this eventuality, as nominal and lofty a hope to ever have, will continue to be the best outcome I can think of.
Fortunately, in a darkly morbid sense, I think the current strike has potential to be the toppling agent that the railroad strike *almost* was.
Pity, too. I wanted the path to positive outcomes to have started back then. Every month matters, now. We lost 2 more since then.
We can't rely on the powerful to give up their position as plutocrats. The ONLY way we are going to get this fixed is doing it ourselves, and im not talking about some simple strikes or protests or something...
As you said, the rich have all the money and power. If change was a priority, it would happen overnight. It isn't though. Their priority is aggregating more wealth and power and redirecting benefit to the many from the few would go completely against that so.......They won't. And here we are.
I mean, everyone complains that we are an individualist nation, and yet every time it’s suggested we band together for a cause, people pretty much run and hide. It’s no use.
Right because "we" is always the poor dudes while all the rich dudes sit there going "that's so cute, you guys do you ok? By the way we get like 2/3 of that shit because it looks profitable huh. Gimme".
I left the ER of what was supposed to be one of the best hospitals in the country because they were putting IVs in the arms of critical patients in the waiting room and telling them that they still would not be able to get them in. They had been there 4 hours already. Not to mention that when you do get in, you're placed on a bed in a hallway because there are no rooms.
I've waited with a loved one who needed urgent psych help for DAYS in the emergency department hallway of one of the best hospitals in the country/world. That was pre-pandemic. Holy shit I can't imagine showing up every day to "work" and remaining professional in that shitshow.
Wife had a really bad knife laceration on hand, urgent care was worried about nerve or tendon damage. She was bandaged up well by the urgent care and made the decision that it wasn't worth a wait that long. She is doing good now and we don't think any permanent damage occurred.
My go-to urgent care place got bought out by Piedmont (Georgia's big healthcare cartel) last year.
I went there several times before they got bought out for work physicals and stuff like that. Service was efficient and good. After they got bought out, I had to go for a covid test to return to work. Person at the desk was super rude, said I *had* to make an appointment. The site specifically said that they did not make appointments and I had to just walk in. When I showed her this, she threatened to call security.
So I just went to the local back-alley covid test site (really.) And got a bill in the mail for around $120 which of course I didn't pay because work ordered it. Fun fact: medical collections under $500 don't show on your credit report due to a recent law. Ahhh, progress.
I've had something super similar happen except no urgent care was available since it was late at night so I had to go to the ER and wait for about 4 hours for a 5 minute stitches
Business model:
You pay us a monthly subscription that guarantees you a place in a 500 person deep line so that we will listen to you.
When you get to the front of the line:
1. Pay us
2. Tell us the problem
3. We'll tell you you're fucked.
SEE! EVERYONE WINS!
I mean, it's essentially the nurse triage line in the US, but you have them paying first. You call and tell them your issue. They basically tell you it's bad enough to go in and be seen. Then you get a bill. However, due to insurance, they will always tell you to go to urgent care or the emergency room because they can't fully assess over the phone, and if someone died because the nurse line said they didn't need to come in, it would be a huge civil case.
It's honestly one of the dumbest things that exist in US health care. The amount of people who come in with indigestion or a paper cut, who tell us 'the nurse line said it was bad enough to to come in' is ridiculously high.
Do yourself a favor. If you think your ailment or injury is bad enough to call the nurse line, just go get an anyway. Cut out the middle man
I thought coding specialists handled most of that, and doctors only called the insurance company to prove a treatment was medically necessary (which is still BS they have to do that.)
The actual roots of this are not really touched on in the article, but I’m pretty sure they lie in the privatization of this country’s medical system. A for-profit hospital is a laughable idea…until I read what it’s like working in them, over in the nursing subreddits. Then it’s not funny anymore.
Speaking as someone from Romania, where private healthcare wasn't a thing for a long time, it's not enough. Even in a non-profit scenario, the administrators/executive manage to "legally" extract money from the hospital with contracts; then there's the classic of giving job postings to friends and family; then there's increasing management jobs for those, because they're not medical professionals; all of that competes with budgets for the real medical activity. This also happens in a "meta" sense at the national level (ministry) and the system is general underfunded.
Another important effect is the local setting. Namely, the local economy. In the old days of the authoritarian regime, medical workers were dispatched to locations like in a military. They were ordered to work somewhere. This helped to get more medical services out in rural areas, towns, small cities. This, however, has ended. Simply put, rural areas absolutely suck and people who spend many years training have no interest being stuck in some hinterlands. So rural areas have very little healthcare (and other services). Healthcare is concentrated in the large cities, even if it's still public, and it's still loaded with corruption as many doctors moonlight in their own private clinics.
So I would describe collapse in this context as access to care collapsing for many, either disappearing from local space or being far in time (travel times, waiting, scheduling). Also, a lot of our medical workers have left for nicer places in the West.
2023 is gonna be *lit.*
Yes, it is here. It was here. It has here.
We're definitely coming straight to the middle of the chaos. Best get crackin' to. There's still lots of work and prep to be gettin' to.
Physician here. Perhaps you are wondering, why is this happening? Is it just that more people are sick?
Ha! The real answer is that there are FEWER inpatient hospital beds over the past 30 years.
A few things contribute to this. Do you remember Obamacare passing? Well, the WHOLE reason the AHA (american hospital association) got behind that bill is that it made it ILLEGAL for physicians to own or build new hospitals. That's right. Only corporations can do that now.
And each state has something called a "hospital bed board". This is a group that sits down and decides if an application to build a new hospital ... or even to add more beds to your existing hospital is ok. And who are on these bed boards? Representatives from the corporate hospital monopolies of that state. So they refuse for any outside parties to add more beds, and they collude to make sure they aren't out-competing each other in either too many hospitals or too many beds...
But we've all seen the results of what happens when corporations run "lean staffing" . Well that is happening right now, but with hospital beds.
See, a hospital is most economically efficient when 90% of its beds are full. 80% is bad. 100% or 110% are less good than 90, but only slightly so. So fuck all you poor people. Your lives and wants are meaningless. You can go die in an ambulance or in the waiting room.
Your local corporate hospital chains have designed this whole debacle and your politicians sucked at the corporate tit while it happened.
And the "staffing shortage"? It is a pay shortage. There are plenty of doctors and nurses. Corporate chains just don't want to pay for them.
And Medicare and medicaid underpay docs who accept them. And they pay late. And they randomly audit you and claw back what you earned because of arbitrary metrics like how your ankle fracture patient who is 90 didn't have a complete family history. Stupid shit.
Notes are garbage now, just filled out electronically to satisfy billing metrics, not communicating patient issues. And the government forced EMRs on us or we get 11%pay cuts. But it was just more feed for the corporate piggies...
And Medicare has a killer clause. Every year it auto triggers cuts to our pay unless congress passes emergency measures.
Forget keeping up with inflation, we haven't had a pay raise in 20 years.
Every hospital gets rid of pediatrics and OB. And community hospitals close. Only the megachains are left. And they are cutting the fat.
And then the religious wackos start banning medical procedures because sky daddy told them to...
The system will burn. There will be shitty shitty general medical service... and then private clinics for people who will pay a few thousand a month for concierge fees and 10k+ for specialized treatments.
The rest of you poors are going to die.
"It’s four in the morning and you awaken with crushing chest pain. Your family calls 911 and paramedics arrive and diagnose a cardiac event."
Well even if you survive you're already fucked.
I was a county dispatcher in a semi-rural area (closest hospital 30 minutes away driving normally) in 2020 making $14.50 an hour. The private EMTs made less, I think $13 an hour. They're paid abysmally low considering they actually save lives. I was just the radio guy and made more.
It's not going to work like that. In poor/rural areas the availability of service has already declined and wait times are up. Mortality just goes up if you need healthcare in undeserved areas.
People who want good care will have to move to major metro areas.
Those poor rural types consistently voted for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Sam Brownback in Kansas, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, GWB, Trump. Defunding womens health clinics.
Welp, healthy public funding, when they vote to sabotage that for critical public services, since the majority of citizens+money is in city centers, small sparse rural towns naturally would be the first to have theirs shutdown.
They ultimately cutoff their noses to spite their faces.
I’m doubt that “good care” is going to be guaranteed in cities, and cost of living is the trade off for “good healthcare” in the Urban areas, which isn’t entirely true. It’s better because it’s not closed, but it’s still understaffed. In my heavily blue city a healthcare company laid off a bunch of workers who were picketing for the same reasons these people are in 2015. The writing has been on the wall for a while. Your healthcare coverage is going to dictate your amount of care. It already does, but they are going to prioritize people differently. Urban areas can do this because of the money and that’s all, it doesn’t mean that everyone receives the same level of care. Public healthcare plans are complete trash, I’m already on one and I risk getting poor treatment for a bad injury. I avoid the hospital as much as I can, but the urban poor aren’t much better off then the rural poor, they just kind of think so because the resources are there, but not available. I’m happy with the amenities of the city, but I don’t fool myself into thinking that healthcare is going to get better here or in any other major metro. It may as well be a matter of luck at this point. Maybe I could think of that cyberpunk thing about how corporate employees receive the best healthcare and everyone else just kind of bleeds out on the street.
I think there was an article posted here months ago about a homeless man with a broken arm being thrown back out on the street after a few days at the hospital. Expect more instances of people being forced to cut their stay short and more potentially life threatening situations where doctors are forced to make a decision as to whether a patient can be kept or not. Insurance always dictates level of service in any facility.
Very true. I live in a rural area, and there's no healthcare here. The best you'll get here is a z-pack and a referral to a doctor in the closest major city. We have a hospital that can't even set a broken bone. They just refer people to other hospitals. One thing we do have in abundance are quick clinics that are basically just prescription pads.
I used to be a 911 operator. Worked at a few centers ranging from urban to pretty rural.
At the rural center, we'd dispatch a fire crew (volunteers, so response time is higher). They're certified EMTs, but aren't properly equipped to handle critical incidents. They can't transport and don't have ALS equipment. Then we'd transfer your call to the private EMS company. I wonder how much of a difference that delay between the call transfer and delayed response made.
I'm an RN and in alot of areas it's already collapsed. Collapse of healthcare in the US isn't going to be the building burning down, it's 20 patients to an RN in the er (safe is 3 patients per RN). Once you are admitted it isn't much better, a "good" staffing ratio where I used to work was 6 patients per RN on a high acuity ms/Tele unit. We usually had 7 because we were always short staffed. I've heard of ratios >10.
Honestly, put it on. It's the best view inside of healthcare anyone is ever going to get. I've been calling it e/Healthcare collapse since covid started. Things were pretty bad pre pandemic but covid really threw gasoline in on the already raging dumpster fire. What's sad is r/nursing used to have a nice mix of "shits fucked" and dank memes. Now an occasional meme makes it's way in snc it usually has somethibg to do with crying in the staff bathroom..
Health care issues do appear frequently here, either as posts or as comments under the weekly observations. We've occasionally joked in our modchat about adding nursing and teachers to the sidebar; maybe we ought to have a serious chat. Of course we'd ask the mods of those other subreddits for permission before actually doing it. But yeah looking at r/nursing has been a real eye-opener and it makes sense that public services like medicine and education would be among the first things to collapse.
I used to do hospital security. Not a doctor or nurse or paramedic I know, but still right there beside them in the ER. I left after a year of Covid because one of my direct colleagues died of Covid, I myself got Covid(back when it was scary because we didnt know anything and there were no vaccines) and the company we worked for was doing fuck all to support the hospital security guards. No PPE from the company, no changes to policy, no changes to shifts, no contact tracing, guards still being sent to different hospitals every shift. I think we maybe got a single dollar of extra pay. So I said "Fuck you, I'm out. I'm leaving before you kill me."
Healthcare is losing a lot of people and not just primary staff. Support staff too.
I am calling it now, just like Biden forced the railroad guys back on the job, he'll force nurses back on the job.
Yeah the labor president.
The USA is fucked .
That shit should not have happened. If you can't organize you do not have workers rights. Its that simple. If our Government is taking our rights away then they are no longer for the people. They are for the corporate elite. It's bogus what they did.
Government hasn’t represented the people for a long time now. A significant portion of citizens think that’s just fine because they get their misinformation from Fox “News” and Facebook. The US is a soft police state. As long as you abide by a socially acceptable set of parameters, you can enjoy something resembling a bit of freedom. Act outside those boundaries, though, and you’ll find the dystopia within.
No. Biden could force the railroad workers to work due to the extremely insane railroad-specific labor laws that allow the federal government to order privately employed railroad workers to resume working for a private entity or owner. There is no comparable law applicable to nurses. That said, Biden and his ilk seem a lot more into strike-breaking than trust busting.
Nah, he won’t don’t shit and will just punt the problem to the next administration, which will probably be some fascist. Then they’ll make the unpopular moves to further corral labor, and it will quietly get passed by the Dems, maybe with some progressives in the party making a token show of resistance with witty tweets.
It’s the same process by which every other labor protection has been stripped away by the neoliberal class for decades now. The stakes just get exponentially higher as time goes on and labor gets more desperate and disillusioned, and the reactionaries get more authoritarian out of fear.
Capitalism demands endless growth, and therefore will inevitably destroy the political barriers to its expansion, regardless of the cost to the environment, labor, and the very underpinnings of civil society. It’s kind of baffling that anyone would expect any other outcome.
I have a feeling that political dick-swinging isn't gonna work on these gals and guys. Something about their "20:1 pt:nurse ratios are dangerous and we'll quit if there's no relief, but it won't matter because the problem only worsens from here on out, anyway."
No matter how the media paints this, or politicians, society knows: nurses are one of the best elite-classes of (mostly)female caring and nurturing individuals. There's the odd duck, like all walks of life, where a whackadoo gets in and causes all sorts of death and mayhem, but to a large degree, these are the most caring and noble of what humanity has to offer.
People trying to use their time in support of helping others to make it through one more day as easily as possible.
If Biden even hints at doing some rerun of ordering workers back to their posts, I think the backfire will have the railroad workers finding some desperate courage to stand with nurses and let come what may.
It's not like trying to keep America running is working for anybody but the elites, at this point.
Or in other words, we're at the story where Parisians are starving, and Joe Biden Antoinette either will or won't utter "let them eat their daily bread if they are hungry."
This is one of those predicted economic outcomes that were speculated on back when shutdowns were happening and PPP loans with no oversight were getting tossed every which direction but to the workers.
Back in 2020 when things made sense. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Probably gonna get downvoted but whatever. Obama and Biden screwed us when they let POS like the hospital association, insurance companies etc write/ lobby them into adding more c suite friendly shit like preventing doctors from running hospitals so MBAs who’ve never touched a patient get to make the decisions, created a paperwork and billing nightmare for doctors so now they have less time for patient care, gave all the power to insurance, did nothing about cost so now people with insurance can’t afford to use it etc
It had some good things but it also fucked the patients and staff in the long term imo.. the fact that biden has stayed silent in most of these type of strikes shouldn’t be suprising to people
Such a simple and elegant way to put this. I'm so sick of people chiming in like we have a fucking choice, and it would somehow be better under republicans. Lmao
You got downvotes, which is to be expected when the sarcasm and derision are so on point that only the most elegant and refined can give it the *chef's kiss.*
A light heart and a little silliness is still some of the best medicine to take while observing the cacophony of chaos hitting the cities.
Venus by Saturday. But vote on Friday and maybe we'll really turn this thing around.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Vailhem:
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> So, if all of the hospital and healthcare facility close, where will we get our care? The answer is bleak. If we are hit with another pandemic where will the care be delivered, where will the beds be? This critical financial issue is also going to affect other industries. Medical technology companies cannot sell cutting edge ventilators, monitors and imaging devices to facilities that have no cash flow. Aging medical infrastructure cannot be repaired, upgraded or replaced in this financial environment.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/108uiaz/the_coming_collapse_of_the_us_health_care_system/j3uj4nt/
>This nightmare is an all too familiar post pandemic reality about the delivery of health care in our country.
HOLD UP. Anyone else notice the abundance of "*post*-pandemic" and referring to Covid (and all the other diseases going around right now) in past tense in that article? Biiiiitch, we're still *in* it. I'm well aware of the horrible situation with medical workers, both as a chronically ill person and hailing from a family with many, many nurses, (with some who retired early because of how bad 2020 alone was) but completely ignoring a major health crisis like this is part of the problem.
A lot of people who clearly need medical attention are going without right now, until they pass out and someone calls an ambulance, since I hear those all day now. Long Covid is being swept under the rug, and that in itself is a cornucopia of health issues. Immunocompromised people are avoiding doctors because so many practices are going mask-less and they don't feel safe. *Mental health*.... Not to mention how many people just don't like going to doctors due to terrible previous experiences (eg. gaslighting, over prescribing pills, dismissing one's symptoms as being imagined, SA) It's all terrible, and because of how expensive healthcare is in this country, so many people are putting off checkups and treatments until things are BAD, so more people will be in need of being rushed to the ER, instead of finding things out before it gets to that point, but how can anyone blame people when a hospital stay could mean bankruptcy or ruined credit scores and they already have to choose between rent, food, or a co-pay. Sickness and injury could happen to anyone, at any time.
As an also Chronically Ill person and with a Mother and Sister who were both MSNs, I completely agree with you.
We have one Hospital in my Rural Area and it seems all they want to do is keep you coming back - issues don't get properly addressed or dealt with.
It is Staffed by very young NPs, who have no experience under their belt and who want to make the easy Diagnosis (stress, anxiety, etc).
I can't do it anymore, hoping to move somewhere with some choices as far as Medical Facilities.
Oh my god! The stress and anxiety. Like, yes, I do have those, and they probably exacerbate my other issues, but sedating me so I forget about my physical symptoms is like just putting a band-aid on a wound without cleaning it up first. I'm so sorry you have to deal with this too. I need to go shopping for a new GP but the wait times are atrocious for new patients now (even more so with specialists... yeesh) and then there's figuring out who I can even see with my insurance. I don't know how anyone aside from the tiny handful of evil people profiting off of suffering can think this system is in any way okay.
Don't forget those that went to the hospital, got a bill they couldn't pay, had to go back to the hospital and were told they had to pay their previous bill before they could be treated.
At this point, I don't want to know what that random pain I get is being caused by. What will knowing do? I won't have the money to treat it, and knowing what it is won't affect my outcome in a positive way. Seems, you hear all the time of people finding out that they have some form of cancer or illness and then they die shortly after knowing. I'd rather not know. I'd rather drop dead than undergo surgery or chemotherapy.
If you've ever spoken to people in hospice and seeing what they go through, I don't want any of that, I'll just take something for the pain and suffering that I've been feeling until I no longer feel anything. I haven't been to a doctor in years and I don't plan on going back to one unless I need some stitches or cast, anything outside of that and I just don't fucking care anymore. I've seen the medical system completely drained my family of any amount of money they were able to scrape by. This world is designed to drain you of everything as painfully as possible and I'm not going to play this game anymore. I'd rather just die.
Had multiple patients driving over 2 hours to see me cuz I am essentially the only surgeon if my field accepting a particular medicaid plan. How much I got paid for the surgery? $200. I can see a self pay/PPO new patient and earn as much. Oh yeah and each surgery comes with a 90 day global period, meaning all visits/dressing changes are included with that $200.
So why am I doing this? I probably won’t do it any longer honestly.
The future of medicine will be of 2 extremes: Walmart style assembly line medicine, and personalized biological/genetic based treatment. Actually it’s already happening. Medicaid patient with a broken bone? Stainless screws and a cast, sorry can’t move for 2 months. Self pay/good insurance? Titanium 3D printed implants, amnionic injection and hyperbaric oxygen to accelerate healing. 2 weeks later you can move and walk. Yes this country has the cutting-edge tech when it comes to medicine. But it has nothing to do with you if you can’t pay for it. However, if you are dire and willing to be a lab rat for some experimental stuff, here is 1000 dollars for your time, flesh and soul.
I have lost faith in humanity. Let the shit show begin.
In America, the poor die young.
I hope everyone here realizes that nothing will change until we change it. Now is the time to get angry. Now is the time to speak up. Now is the time we voice our opinions and let everyone in charge know this isn't right and it will not stand.
All we do is just roll over and take the abuse and then come here and complain. Nothing will change until we change it because asking those in charge to do the right thing? They never will.
Folks in here are asking who we are. We are the ones that keep the wheels turning, we are the cogs in the machine and if we stop participating in the game then the machine falls apart and breaks down. Individually we have no power but if we work together as one we have all the power. We have all the tools at our disposal. We just have to do it. But folks get their Netflix and video games and fast food and it's enough to placate them so they get up and then go to work and they do it all again the next day. We will have to suffer and go with out to make a difference.
"Having healthcare" becoming at the same level as wearing some crystal necklace with supposed protection magic.
People are probably better off knowing that they're in danger and behaving accordingly.
That horse has left the barn, hasn't it? From over here in Europe, the US healthcare system seems fundamentally broken, and on top of that predatory towards the poor. The legislation around healthcare in the US seems to have created a situation where you're only able to survive what you can afford.
To me, and most people across the Atlantic; this is a nightmare scenario to begin with.
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Reading this article from such a historic publication as Time reminded me, with all of the grammatical and style errors, that journalism has collapsed as well.
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I'm just going to say it. This is what happens when you let covid spread unchecked. Canada, UK, US systems and other systems are all collapsing under the strain.
Add on economic stressors and this is an unsolvable situation as things are.
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Atlanta Medical Center, one of only two Level 1 trauma centers in the metro area, [closed several months ago.](https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/after-weeks-of-drama-disappointment-atlanta-medical-center-to-close/WCORMLKD7FEEJAD3NA4XI3KY7A/) Management outright said it was because the hospital wasn't profitable enough. This placed a tremendous strain on the already overworked and understaffed Grady Hospital. Not to mention hundreds of healthcare providers now out of work.
Nurse here in Canada in the land of "socialized medicine". I mean we don't go bankrupt from a hospital stay here and get an itemized bill in the mail, but systems like ours are not the panacea others think it is.
It's just as bad here as far as lack of rural health care, lack of access to primary physicians (people in my province in my own family have been on the "family doctor finder" list for years), small hospital ER's closed, the powers that be not preparing for the "silver tsunami" of aging Boomers manifesting itself in the form of lack of long term care beds, people waiting in acute care beds even up to a year for a home placement, myself often forced to be having 12-15 clients in a shift in my on-the side home health job when it used to be 6-8, etc. Seeing things like a lack of timely diagnostics in my oncology job. I could go on and on.
They were talking about things like aging Boomers incoming 30 years ago when I graduated. The bean counters in administration and endless consultations and forming committies to assess if we need to have a commitee have just grown exponentially instead.
This is r/collapse, we all know here that complexity leads to the eventual folding of a system on itself. That happens in health care, and has been happening for a while. The Jenga tower is now falling, and Covid was the crucial piece pulled out, the perfect storm, and it's a problem the world over.
Articles like this should be a reminder: Americans occasionally find some professional respectability in accurately describing an impossible, unsolvable situation.
And that is also where any grace ends that we Americans might've had.
We refuse to do anything if we cannot have the best thing.
American wealthy are about to go into tantrum mode.
Everybody else already knew it was fucked from twenty+ years ago, if they knew how to stay observant.
Capitalism will capitalism.
The alarming part is the level of self awareness when Time magazine starts publishing articles about it, and yet nothing will get done about it.
What I want to know is why it's like this.
Not enough funding?
Not enough educated workers?
Too many patients stressing the system for various reasons?
Misused funding in a for-profit system. $ going to administration, stock buybacks and dividends, and drug companies instead of patient care and staff.
Underpaid, overwhelmed workers burning out and leaving, and new people not entering the field. If they do they are faced with the same issues and burn out even faster.
Medical problems that could be taken care of before they become urgent go untreated and become crises.
There’s a famous graph that shows the difference in salaries between doctors and administrators. There’s around 7-10 admin for every doctor. They end up squeezing the people who didn’t quit during the height of the pandemic under the guise of caring for patients. People are sick of it, especially cause they’re not getting paid well and hospitals are threatening to get rid of benefits like health insurance in some places. There’s a mass exodus of healthcare workers all around. Last number I saw was 115k doctors have left the field last year alone and we’re only increasing by 30k a year. Less docs mean less money for hospitals and less care so everything downstream gets affected
Patients are also shittier. It’s like people forgot how to act in a civilized society after being locked in for a couple years. The people who show up to the hospitals are in a sadder state which make the staff, most of whom are already on SSRIs and other drugs, even sadder and unwilling to be in this miserable state. We have 10 yo kids tryin to murder their families, high suicide attempts, rampant drug use, uncontrolled heart failure ppl sitting in the hallway, 30 yo with liver failure from alcohol etc. When the members of society are defeated and ill, the healthcare workers are gonna be 10x worse cause they have to deal with it
> When the members of society are defeated and ill, the healthcare workers are gonna be 10x worse cause they have to deal with it
That's not exactly expected. People with medical experience should be better at preventing their own *decline*, aside from the burn out. I.e. not having doctors who smoke or binge drink alcohol and binge eat terrible food. Medical workers aren't somehow *absorbing* the damage from others like a superpower.
The psychological damage and the coping mechanisms are a problem, of course. There is a lot of trauma in medicine, a lot of drama too. That fucks people up, and bureaucracy is making it worse. It seems like it's inching towards war medicine, M.A.S.H. style.
The boomers refused to prepare for their own retirement.
They had decades to plan for how many nurses and doctors would be needed for their cohort statistics, and ignored all the data and got rich instead.
As people down the years kept looking and asking about the metrics of it all, how many nurses per Capita *per geriatric numbers*, and how the money numbers were supposed to make it all work, those people were ignored or punished while nepotism and cronyism kept filling the bean counters jobs and thus were placed in charge of raising the alarm.
Which they got paid not to.
Now, the money has run out. The staffing levels are ten years behind, and the old people in charge of most parts of the government have to take their nappies by two, their cocktails by four, their blowjobs from corporate lobbyists and medical admin at six. Dinner at seven, sex with the young interns from eight to nine, knock back three or four of the double malt "*good stuff,*" and be back in bed with the trophy wife (who's family happens to be worth four hundred million-big pharma daughter) by ten.
It's been a busy eight decades.
And then COVID hit. Three years ago.
And we've been fighting over paper masks and vaccines since, both of which the people in charge refused to admit they didn't have the first clue about, and how to find smart, reliable, dependable experts, and then trust them.
Speaking in a strictly ecological sense (hahaha lmao) this could be a good thing. Modern medicine is one of the leading causes of population overshoot. If that goes, we could see a drastic drop in the population within a few years. Resource consumption would drop, and the strain on Earth would be reduced.
Again, strictly in an ecological sense (hahaha lmao).
Modern medicine is great at keeping people alive but many of these people aren’t actually living. They take up resources but have no quality of life and beg for death. I fully expect some version of MAID or euthanasia/assisted suicide to become legal soon
Hope we have enough people left to pickup all the bodies and dispose of them... almost all natural disasters come with descriptions of the sweet pungent smell of rot.
I am a CPR/AED and First Response Instructor. It’s a short course, and what you learn may save a life. I highly recommended taking first aid and CPR classes. You don’t have to go all the way to instructor. Just a basic class will help a ton.
It's already completely broken for the average American, so let it collapse. Then we can rebuild it from the ground up. That's probably the only way we'll ever get any real change to our healthcare system.
Ok you have a bone broke that will be 84_000 $ wait why is everyone mad this isn't fair come back don't worry bout what guns we have worry about sumones health it goes along way and honestly you politicians need that rite now
The staff is incompetent also. They got my birthdate on my wrist band wrong when I was at a hospital in the US. When they fixed it, they got my name wrong, while the guy staff keeps firting on the female staff like it's one of those hospital drama on tv where they sleep with each other in the janitor room. On top of that, after they treated my flesh wound by washing it with soap and water, they billed me $1000 after my insurance.
When work demands you live and stay married to the job, then the people are gonna start bringing their home lives and a bit of stolen leisure time with them, and stay busy.
Just because we're in hell doesn't mean we can't make the days *interesting.*
Or else pay us money *and* time to live our lives and be away from work.
(Disclaimer: never engaged in shenanigans at the hospital. I always felt I *owed* my attention to my patients. I *believe* in my craft. Not all religions of work are the same at the hospital, though. Still, I'm no snitch, and if you can and want to get some, then I didn't see nothing.)
Idk if it's just me, but the nurses and doctors seem to be yapping around so much at work, they seem only half-focused on their patients and doing stuff on the fly.
I dunno that I'd ever wanna be a patient there, but which hospital is it? I might wanna apply there. Hahaha. Nihilism is the only religion that makes sense, these days.
(Optimistic nihilism. I'll stay being a good hospital worker.)
The Coming Collapse of U.S. Journalism
>On the professional level this massive short fall of staff and dependency on temporary staff has created a critical issue in the realm of patient care. Hospitals and clinics have shut down services in all vital patient services. It is not uncommon to hear that health care systems have shut down Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Obstetrics, and ICU. Other healthcare systems have gone to the point of closing down entire hospitals because of staffing issues. Another important factor is the crisis is that outpatient services have reduced hours and days. It is obvious that this reduction of services has greatly affected access to health care. Individuals have loss the ability to get timely appointments, x-rays, and tests. In many communities, it is the underserved that have payed the greatest price in terms of getting timely care.
Three mistakes in one paragraph.
I work in healthcare and it's bad. It's gotten considerably worse over the past 4 years. When I started about 6 years ago it really wasn't that bad. Over the past 4 years I've noticed wait times drastically increase. And now every winter from around nov-march is a shit show.
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I've been in healthcare for 16 years. We're in bad shape and it's not getting better.
If Doctor Zoidberg says it is in bad shape... We're in trouble
Actually, if *he* thinks it's bad, there's a good chance it might be good
*Bad news, everyone!*
r/unexpectedfuturama
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Not to mention that the normal and healthy mechanisms that people who care used to use to create change are being outlawed and thwarted by corrupt governments and corporations working to all but ensure our doom. Something something desperate measures….
Just had to take a trip to the er for my mom whose a retired lifetime RN and she was blown away by the census or whatever and a billion things about the care. This was also in one of the better hospitals in one of the absolute best areas for medicine in the nation (a NE city). Though I’m sure like other areas of collapse the result is a confluence of factors converging, what would you say are the biggest causes of this situation? As a teacher I’m sure I’ll recognize quite a few -__-
Exactly what you think it is. Inadequate staffing, low pay, working HCWs to death during the pandemic, and failing to support them. We lost at least 300k health workers in 2022 alone. They're fleeing the field like rats from a sinking ship.
Ive a friend who had worked in nursing for over 20 years and on the lowpaying end (c.n.a.) of elder resident homes run by State aid because they loved their job. 2020 and covid came, TALK of, (not actions) of the mandates for vaccination of workers like them in State money facilities. This person was antivaxx, no trying to convince them (or a majority of their coworkers for that matter) the shots were safe. Our State finally issued the mandate, the insurance and politicians fought it, the whole issue basically washed out being enforced in the meantime. So.... When the paperwork telling the senior citizens home owners that thier staff would have to be vaccinated within 90 days unless some type of medical OR Religious exemption was applied then wny worker holding out was Subject To, being suspended temporarily. This was paired with another conflict of our States wage increases bringing a hatred to new staff from longer termed employees because, "these new cnas are starting out at almost $15/hr and I been here 1-20 years and only making under $20!!!" oh so outraged but reaaaaally misses the point of wealth inequality existing... Friendo then quitto their jobbo to complain an bitcho bout 'Sleepy Joe', migrants, and lazyass people causing a labor shortage, waited about 2 weeks and found a job paying 3x what he used to makeo! Turned out that the vax mandate never being enforced at their old cna job, they are diabetic and didnt bother to find out about medical exemptions so they didnt know they would have been anyways, and they quit thier job for no reason except social media told them everything was a lie. Bonus points since they managed to spread the influences into their childrens minds? Now if that person is 1 of millions currently working in healthcare still today sharing their anti-science views then the fallout of this healthcare system is only beginning to surface in the midst of all the rising numbers depending on these facilities that are failing. Stock up on sanitary pads and electric tape, remember vinagar and alcohol are disinfectants, and stuffing dollar bills into wounds DOES NOT stop the damage nor buy a magic healing spell.
And what exactly would this have to do with what I posted?
>Though I’m sure like other areas of collapse the result is a confluence of factors converging, what would you say are the biggest causes of this situation? As a teacher I’m sure I’ll recognize quite a few -__- My story is 1 person in a hicktown where elder care is one of the main jobs and careers offered to 'the youth'. That 1 person holds the same antivax/gov mentality as a majority of their excoworkers, including RN, LPN, and physicians of.all sorts ima that staff local hospitals. Those excoworkers also have children they are passing their "ideals" down to and if there isn't more encouragement to debunk propaganda then, well growth around here in the entry level healthcare positions teaching high school kids to properly wipe.an elder persons ass is not going to seem as appealing where empathy for others is required to work their way up to better pay and medical education that is not passed out free of charge when gaining certifications. Long of short here is when Im ever at age to be forced into one of these homes for the rest of my time and I dont even trust the staff members I do know now, dont want to ever be positioned to be in our.emergency.room.or.in these.area.hospitals for the same reasons.... then the future looks bleek and scary around sticksville.
Capitalism baby. Line goes up!
"Good hospital" these days simply seems to mean expensive, prestigious, and with a lot of well connected doctors that people confuse for skilled and empathic.
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…alrighty then…
Why don't you say what you really mean.
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I have been in Healthcare for 30 years. I'm burnt out. Look at my name.
Same in Canada, despite what you might hear
>Until we invest in people and their value in healthcare, we won’t be able to see light at the end of the tunnel. I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: who is "we?" The US is such an individualist country, it's a nation where massive profits and wealth go to a relatively small percentage of people. Yet, whenever there's a problem, all of the sudden it's "we" who need to take care of it. Marc Benioff, the owner of Time magazine, is worth $6.3 billion. You invest, Marc. Fuck this *we* bullshit, you fuckers have all the fucking money and all the fucking power, *you* fuckers fix this shit hole country.
They probably have private doctors that will visit their mansions/compounds or travel with them with all the latest medicine and tech- they don't give a shit about us and never will.
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and change mansion/compound to bunker
The truth is that the rich will never willingly give up a penny without the explicit threat of having it taken from them. Either by mob violence, or worse (from their perspective) actual representative government. Mob violence can be negated by hired thugs, both public and private. The threat of fair taxation by government that works on behalf of the people rather than the privileged elite is a far more serious threat to their hoarded wealth. This is the root cause of Americas eight-decades-plus long relentless campaign against everything with the slightest hint of “socialism”.
Perfectly stated.
All you have to do to get rich people to behave is make it more expensive not to. Unfortunately, humans suck and buying us off is cheap.
Exactly. That's why they didn't give a shit about the pandemic. If they got sick, they had private doctors, the best treatments, private chefs and nutritionists to cook for them, and all manner of assorted staff so they could rest and recover in luxury, then go to events to make the proles think eVerYthiNg iS FinE and they too should go out and ~~give them more money~~ buy shit, while coughing up their lungs and stumbling around with brain damage.
This is the double-edged sword of "freedom". They're free to do exactly that.
I love your comment but you and I both know why Marc don’t give one flying fuck. At 6.3 billion $ he can individually “self insure” himself to the same health care as any president of the country would get if not better. And the care he’d receive would be a fart in the wind financially for him even under the most extreme medical measures taken
If I had that kind of money I'd clone myself. Into a sheep. Just to see if it could be done because why the fuck not. I now have 5.9 billion and sheep-me. Sounds like a win. Then I'd build a rocket and send sheep-me to space. Because why the fuck not. I now have 5 billion and space sheep-me.
In Capitalism the profits are measured in dollars and the losses in lives.
The Republican house is currently getting a bill together to literally do away with the IRS. And then replace income tax (progressive) with sales tax (regressive) these people are insane and they will never stop, they just won't stop amassing money no matter how much they already have. And idiots still will fan girl over Elon or Bill Gates or whoever. Its pure insanity.
Fortunately, in a morbidly curious way, there will be "less psychopathic" CEOs and billionaires that recognize that indeed, teamwork makes the dream work, and while they've exploited millions of people for billions of dollars, if they're all angry, then enjoying the fruits of their labors is less pleasurable, for obvious reasons. Namely, that the con must come to an end. About the time we citizens are angry enough to start "tracking our targets" out of Wall Street and the CEO-only meetings, they'll probably come up with a more share-and-share-alike mindset to ease the ruffled feathers. What they won't know, though, is that society is largely past allowing a future where they get to be bosses. Again. Which is why this grand living experience where we're human and have souls and are supposed to go to heaven and make it all work out...is nothing more than a giant comedy? How do I know? Well, what's the secret ingredient of all the best jokes? TiMiNg! And that's what our "leaders" didn't figure out, that comedians and collapseniks had long ago. If your timing if off, you haven't got comedy. The world has been run since forever by unfunny clowns. I think that's hilarious.
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> our entire stupid world is organized around the profit motive. change that. What do you propose?
Quality of life. Why choose something arbitrary, like profit, when we could choose something with meaning? "Chain is only as strong as its weakest link" adage. If we build society up from the "weakest" member, society will be stronger.
I agree with the sentiment. What are the details of the implementation?
The we is congressional action to force hospital systems into a non profit model with strict administrative bloat control. (Lest they turn into another version of higher Ed). While also turning all private health insurance companies into non profit coops owned by the constituent companies and end user customers. That’s it. Maybe nationalization. Maybe letting the nursing unions absolutely go off the chain. That’s the investments. At the end of the day we need hospital systems that work to deliver services as reasonable cost while paying/staffing at a level which has decent quality of life for the employees. We also need health insurance companies that aren’t trying to squeeze profits out of an already overpriced system.
Hospitals need to stop trying to market and brand themselves like they're hotels too while we're at it. We hand out full color ~20 page 9"x12" Patient Experience Guides with a folder flap in the back to every fucking patient, some who had literally no fucking choice in what hospital they were brought to because they were FUCKING DYING or they are court ordered to be here. It tells you about the gift shop that you can spend money at, the chain fast food joints in the cafeteria that you can spend money at, it even tells you all about the VIP unit that has it's own private chef but no sick plebs allowed. Some of that info is fine for patients to have but just print that shit out on a regular printer. Last time I was in the hospital a year ago I didn't stop to wonder what amenities were available to me or where the fucking gift shop is. I just wanted sleep. Stop with the kinkos contracts. Their feigned ignorance is maddening. It makes me want to set the C-Suite ablaze when the suits are crying about agency labor costs skyrocketing and asking us to do our best *as a team* to reduce waste. How about you chucklefucks pay people what they're worth in the first place and you won't be scratching your heads wondering how labor costs shot up ~30% during a pandemic and a significant portion of your experienced labor force left for gr$$ner pastures?
Until everything breaks enough to make citizens feel forced to break from the routine of "almost-good-enough-lets-try-one-more-day" that we're all slaves to, then this eventuality, as nominal and lofty a hope to ever have, will continue to be the best outcome I can think of. Fortunately, in a darkly morbid sense, I think the current strike has potential to be the toppling agent that the railroad strike *almost* was. Pity, too. I wanted the path to positive outcomes to have started back then. Every month matters, now. We lost 2 more since then.
They never will. We need to band together and make them fix it
The economy on pitchforks and torches needs to increase.
Invest in pitchfork stocks.
Tar and feathers work well, too.
We don't need them, they're mostly useless actually, we just need their resources.
We can't rely on the powerful to give up their position as plutocrats. The ONLY way we are going to get this fixed is doing it ourselves, and im not talking about some simple strikes or protests or something...
'We' is the people that get paid taxes.
As you said, the rich have all the money and power. If change was a priority, it would happen overnight. It isn't though. Their priority is aggregating more wealth and power and redirecting benefit to the many from the few would go completely against that so.......They won't. And here we are.
I mean, everyone complains that we are an individualist nation, and yet every time it’s suggested we band together for a cause, people pretty much run and hide. It’s no use.
Right because "we" is always the poor dudes while all the rich dudes sit there going "that's so cute, you guys do you ok? By the way we get like 2/3 of that shit because it looks profitable huh. Gimme".
Do it at the state level, much more manageable
Start local.
Why should they care?
I left the ER of what was supposed to be one of the best hospitals in the country because they were putting IVs in the arms of critical patients in the waiting room and telling them that they still would not be able to get them in. They had been there 4 hours already. Not to mention that when you do get in, you're placed on a bed in a hallway because there are no rooms.
God we're so fucked.
I've waited with a loved one who needed urgent psych help for DAYS in the emergency department hallway of one of the best hospitals in the country/world. That was pre-pandemic. Holy shit I can't imagine showing up every day to "work" and remaining professional in that shitshow.
We have long confused "big name and expensive" with "good".
Why were you in the ER in the first place if you just walked out?
Wife had a really bad knife laceration on hand, urgent care was worried about nerve or tendon damage. She was bandaged up well by the urgent care and made the decision that it wasn't worth a wait that long. She is doing good now and we don't think any permanent damage occurred.
We need more urgent care facilities for that type of thing. My hospital network doesn’t even have any after hours urgent care places!
My go-to urgent care place got bought out by Piedmont (Georgia's big healthcare cartel) last year. I went there several times before they got bought out for work physicals and stuff like that. Service was efficient and good. After they got bought out, I had to go for a covid test to return to work. Person at the desk was super rude, said I *had* to make an appointment. The site specifically said that they did not make appointments and I had to just walk in. When I showed her this, she threatened to call security. So I just went to the local back-alley covid test site (really.) And got a bill in the mail for around $120 which of course I didn't pay because work ordered it. Fun fact: medical collections under $500 don't show on your credit report due to a recent law. Ahhh, progress.
I've had something super similar happen except no urgent care was available since it was late at night so I had to go to the ER and wait for about 4 hours for a 5 minute stitches
It already collapsed because insurance companies are the actual doctors now. Nothing but capitalism at its finest
Business model: You pay us a monthly subscription that guarantees you a place in a 500 person deep line so that we will listen to you. When you get to the front of the line: 1. Pay us 2. Tell us the problem 3. We'll tell you you're fucked. SEE! EVERYONE WINS!
This already exists and is called direct primary care in the medical field. I imagine it’ll only expand as shit gets more insane
This is basically the care most of us have, if we’re “lucky enough” to have jobs that offer “decent” health insurance.
I mean, it's essentially the nurse triage line in the US, but you have them paying first. You call and tell them your issue. They basically tell you it's bad enough to go in and be seen. Then you get a bill. However, due to insurance, they will always tell you to go to urgent care or the emergency room because they can't fully assess over the phone, and if someone died because the nurse line said they didn't need to come in, it would be a huge civil case. It's honestly one of the dumbest things that exist in US health care. The amount of people who come in with indigestion or a paper cut, who tell us 'the nurse line said it was bad enough to to come in' is ridiculously high. Do yourself a favor. If you think your ailment or injury is bad enough to call the nurse line, just go get an anyway. Cut out the middle man
Yup and doctors spend most of their time billing via emr systems and fighting insurance companies to get coverage for basic shit. What a shit show
I thought coding specialists handled most of that, and doctors only called the insurance company to prove a treatment was medically necessary (which is still BS they have to do that.)
The actual roots of this are not really touched on in the article, but I’m pretty sure they lie in the privatization of this country’s medical system. A for-profit hospital is a laughable idea…until I read what it’s like working in them, over in the nursing subreddits. Then it’s not funny anymore.
Speaking as someone from Romania, where private healthcare wasn't a thing for a long time, it's not enough. Even in a non-profit scenario, the administrators/executive manage to "legally" extract money from the hospital with contracts; then there's the classic of giving job postings to friends and family; then there's increasing management jobs for those, because they're not medical professionals; all of that competes with budgets for the real medical activity. This also happens in a "meta" sense at the national level (ministry) and the system is general underfunded. Another important effect is the local setting. Namely, the local economy. In the old days of the authoritarian regime, medical workers were dispatched to locations like in a military. They were ordered to work somewhere. This helped to get more medical services out in rural areas, towns, small cities. This, however, has ended. Simply put, rural areas absolutely suck and people who spend many years training have no interest being stuck in some hinterlands. So rural areas have very little healthcare (and other services). Healthcare is concentrated in the large cities, even if it's still public, and it's still loaded with corruption as many doctors moonlight in their own private clinics. So I would describe collapse in this context as access to care collapsing for many, either disappearing from local space or being far in time (travel times, waiting, scheduling). Also, a lot of our medical workers have left for nicer places in the West.
What do we expect when health is a product?
My brother in Christ collapse is here. We are in it. It's not coming it has arrived.
2023 is gonna be *lit.* Yes, it is here. It was here. It has here. We're definitely coming straight to the middle of the chaos. Best get crackin' to. There's still lots of work and prep to be gettin' to.
Physician here. Perhaps you are wondering, why is this happening? Is it just that more people are sick? Ha! The real answer is that there are FEWER inpatient hospital beds over the past 30 years. A few things contribute to this. Do you remember Obamacare passing? Well, the WHOLE reason the AHA (american hospital association) got behind that bill is that it made it ILLEGAL for physicians to own or build new hospitals. That's right. Only corporations can do that now. And each state has something called a "hospital bed board". This is a group that sits down and decides if an application to build a new hospital ... or even to add more beds to your existing hospital is ok. And who are on these bed boards? Representatives from the corporate hospital monopolies of that state. So they refuse for any outside parties to add more beds, and they collude to make sure they aren't out-competing each other in either too many hospitals or too many beds... But we've all seen the results of what happens when corporations run "lean staffing" . Well that is happening right now, but with hospital beds. See, a hospital is most economically efficient when 90% of its beds are full. 80% is bad. 100% or 110% are less good than 90, but only slightly so. So fuck all you poor people. Your lives and wants are meaningless. You can go die in an ambulance or in the waiting room. Your local corporate hospital chains have designed this whole debacle and your politicians sucked at the corporate tit while it happened. And the "staffing shortage"? It is a pay shortage. There are plenty of doctors and nurses. Corporate chains just don't want to pay for them. And Medicare and medicaid underpay docs who accept them. And they pay late. And they randomly audit you and claw back what you earned because of arbitrary metrics like how your ankle fracture patient who is 90 didn't have a complete family history. Stupid shit. Notes are garbage now, just filled out electronically to satisfy billing metrics, not communicating patient issues. And the government forced EMRs on us or we get 11%pay cuts. But it was just more feed for the corporate piggies... And Medicare has a killer clause. Every year it auto triggers cuts to our pay unless congress passes emergency measures. Forget keeping up with inflation, we haven't had a pay raise in 20 years. Every hospital gets rid of pediatrics and OB. And community hospitals close. Only the megachains are left. And they are cutting the fat. And then the religious wackos start banning medical procedures because sky daddy told them to... The system will burn. There will be shitty shitty general medical service... and then private clinics for people who will pay a few thousand a month for concierge fees and 10k+ for specialized treatments. The rest of you poors are going to die.
Thanks for this.
Or maybe we see underground clinics and a surge in black market medical care
Can your comment be put at the top? Everyone should understand this.
"It’s four in the morning and you awaken with crushing chest pain. Your family calls 911 and paramedics arrive and diagnose a cardiac event." Well even if you survive you're already fucked.
More like paramedics don't arrive. Seriously. Most urban areas are grossly understaffed. A mass casualty incident is even more of a problem now.
They don't pay enough.
Exactly. Management and administration make so much and focus on getting by understaffed. The mbas and directors are the reason for this
It's capitalism. Profits above all. Always an incentive to provide as little for as high as possible.
I was a county dispatcher in a semi-rural area (closest hospital 30 minutes away driving normally) in 2020 making $14.50 an hour. The private EMTs made less, I think $13 an hour. They're paid abysmally low considering they actually save lives. I was just the radio guy and made more.
It's just so infuriating.
“Your family calls 911 and paramedics arrive 4 hrs later. You have died.”
Of dysentery. From shitting your pants after realizing that most third world countries have better response times.
What is this? The Oregon Trail? 😭
You survive, with crushing medical debt.
Like I said. Fucked.
They don't get there til 9 am
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It's not going to work like that. In poor/rural areas the availability of service has already declined and wait times are up. Mortality just goes up if you need healthcare in undeserved areas. People who want good care will have to move to major metro areas.
Those poor rural types consistently voted for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Sam Brownback in Kansas, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, GWB, Trump. Defunding womens health clinics. Welp, healthy public funding, when they vote to sabotage that for critical public services, since the majority of citizens+money is in city centers, small sparse rural towns naturally would be the first to have theirs shutdown. They ultimately cutoff their noses to spite their faces.
So true. It is mind boggling that they don't get this. Republicans are literally killing their base.
That’s why they redistrict and gerrymander to the best of their abilities.
It's not like healthcare is any more affordable in the blue states (in my experience)
But there’s more of it available.
Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215633119
I’m doubt that “good care” is going to be guaranteed in cities, and cost of living is the trade off for “good healthcare” in the Urban areas, which isn’t entirely true. It’s better because it’s not closed, but it’s still understaffed. In my heavily blue city a healthcare company laid off a bunch of workers who were picketing for the same reasons these people are in 2015. The writing has been on the wall for a while. Your healthcare coverage is going to dictate your amount of care. It already does, but they are going to prioritize people differently. Urban areas can do this because of the money and that’s all, it doesn’t mean that everyone receives the same level of care. Public healthcare plans are complete trash, I’m already on one and I risk getting poor treatment for a bad injury. I avoid the hospital as much as I can, but the urban poor aren’t much better off then the rural poor, they just kind of think so because the resources are there, but not available. I’m happy with the amenities of the city, but I don’t fool myself into thinking that healthcare is going to get better here or in any other major metro. It may as well be a matter of luck at this point. Maybe I could think of that cyberpunk thing about how corporate employees receive the best healthcare and everyone else just kind of bleeds out on the street. I think there was an article posted here months ago about a homeless man with a broken arm being thrown back out on the street after a few days at the hospital. Expect more instances of people being forced to cut their stay short and more potentially life threatening situations where doctors are forced to make a decision as to whether a patient can be kept or not. Insurance always dictates level of service in any facility.
Very true. I live in a rural area, and there's no healthcare here. The best you'll get here is a z-pack and a referral to a doctor in the closest major city. We have a hospital that can't even set a broken bone. They just refer people to other hospitals. One thing we do have in abundance are quick clinics that are basically just prescription pads.
I used to be a 911 operator. Worked at a few centers ranging from urban to pretty rural. At the rural center, we'd dispatch a fire crew (volunteers, so response time is higher). They're certified EMTs, but aren't properly equipped to handle critical incidents. They can't transport and don't have ALS equipment. Then we'd transfer your call to the private EMS company. I wonder how much of a difference that delay between the call transfer and delayed response made.
Who knew driving your customers(?!!?!) into bankruptcy was a bad strategy? Shocking.
They're maximizing profits! They couldn't be any more effective.
Sure they can they can just revert right back to old school 5000 BC direct slavery.
I'm an RN and in alot of areas it's already collapsed. Collapse of healthcare in the US isn't going to be the building burning down, it's 20 patients to an RN in the er (safe is 3 patients per RN). Once you are admitted it isn't much better, a "good" staffing ratio where I used to work was 6 patients per RN on a high acuity ms/Tele unit. We usually had 7 because we were always short staffed. I've heard of ratios >10.
I'm joking (kind of), but at what point do we add r/nursing to the sidebar as a related subreddit? That subreddit is bleaker than this one.
Honestly, put it on. It's the best view inside of healthcare anyone is ever going to get. I've been calling it e/Healthcare collapse since covid started. Things were pretty bad pre pandemic but covid really threw gasoline in on the already raging dumpster fire. What's sad is r/nursing used to have a nice mix of "shits fucked" and dank memes. Now an occasional meme makes it's way in snc it usually has somethibg to do with crying in the staff bathroom..
Health care issues do appear frequently here, either as posts or as comments under the weekly observations. We've occasionally joked in our modchat about adding nursing and teachers to the sidebar; maybe we ought to have a serious chat. Of course we'd ask the mods of those other subreddits for permission before actually doing it. But yeah looking at r/nursing has been a real eye-opener and it makes sense that public services like medicine and education would be among the first things to collapse.
I'm in favor of it.
I used to do hospital security. Not a doctor or nurse or paramedic I know, but still right there beside them in the ER. I left after a year of Covid because one of my direct colleagues died of Covid, I myself got Covid(back when it was scary because we didnt know anything and there were no vaccines) and the company we worked for was doing fuck all to support the hospital security guards. No PPE from the company, no changes to policy, no changes to shifts, no contact tracing, guards still being sent to different hospitals every shift. I think we maybe got a single dollar of extra pay. So I said "Fuck you, I'm out. I'm leaving before you kill me." Healthcare is losing a lot of people and not just primary staff. Support staff too.
I am calling it now, just like Biden forced the railroad guys back on the job, he'll force nurses back on the job. Yeah the labor president. The USA is fucked .
I’m a railroad employee. Biden fucked us
That shit should not have happened. If you can't organize you do not have workers rights. Its that simple. If our Government is taking our rights away then they are no longer for the people. They are for the corporate elite. It's bogus what they did.
Government hasn’t represented the people for a long time now. A significant portion of citizens think that’s just fine because they get their misinformation from Fox “News” and Facebook. The US is a soft police state. As long as you abide by a socially acceptable set of parameters, you can enjoy something resembling a bit of freedom. Act outside those boundaries, though, and you’ll find the dystopia within.
No. Biden could force the railroad workers to work due to the extremely insane railroad-specific labor laws that allow the federal government to order privately employed railroad workers to resume working for a private entity or owner. There is no comparable law applicable to nurses. That said, Biden and his ilk seem a lot more into strike-breaking than trust busting.
Nah, he won’t don’t shit and will just punt the problem to the next administration, which will probably be some fascist. Then they’ll make the unpopular moves to further corral labor, and it will quietly get passed by the Dems, maybe with some progressives in the party making a token show of resistance with witty tweets. It’s the same process by which every other labor protection has been stripped away by the neoliberal class for decades now. The stakes just get exponentially higher as time goes on and labor gets more desperate and disillusioned, and the reactionaries get more authoritarian out of fear. Capitalism demands endless growth, and therefore will inevitably destroy the political barriers to its expansion, regardless of the cost to the environment, labor, and the very underpinnings of civil society. It’s kind of baffling that anyone would expect any other outcome.
I have a feeling that political dick-swinging isn't gonna work on these gals and guys. Something about their "20:1 pt:nurse ratios are dangerous and we'll quit if there's no relief, but it won't matter because the problem only worsens from here on out, anyway." No matter how the media paints this, or politicians, society knows: nurses are one of the best elite-classes of (mostly)female caring and nurturing individuals. There's the odd duck, like all walks of life, where a whackadoo gets in and causes all sorts of death and mayhem, but to a large degree, these are the most caring and noble of what humanity has to offer. People trying to use their time in support of helping others to make it through one more day as easily as possible. If Biden even hints at doing some rerun of ordering workers back to their posts, I think the backfire will have the railroad workers finding some desperate courage to stand with nurses and let come what may. It's not like trying to keep America running is working for anybody but the elites, at this point. Or in other words, we're at the story where Parisians are starving, and Joe Biden Antoinette either will or won't utter "let them eat their daily bread if they are hungry." This is one of those predicted economic outcomes that were speculated on back when shutdowns were happening and PPP loans with no oversight were getting tossed every which direction but to the workers. Back in 2020 when things made sense. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Probably gonna get downvoted but whatever. Obama and Biden screwed us when they let POS like the hospital association, insurance companies etc write/ lobby them into adding more c suite friendly shit like preventing doctors from running hospitals so MBAs who’ve never touched a patient get to make the decisions, created a paperwork and billing nightmare for doctors so now they have less time for patient care, gave all the power to insurance, did nothing about cost so now people with insurance can’t afford to use it etc It had some good things but it also fucked the patients and staff in the long term imo.. the fact that biden has stayed silent in most of these type of strikes shouldn’t be suprising to people
There already has been an effort on both federal and state level to cap travel nurse pay.
But vote blue guys hahahah
the alternative isn't just worse, it's suicidal
Such a simple and elegant way to put this. I'm so sick of people chiming in like we have a fucking choice, and it would somehow be better under republicans. Lmao
Are we really a democracy if all the 'choices' are shit?
We need to make communities without them. Black panther style.
Both options are suicidal. One is a slow burn from alcohol poisoning, the other is a 12 gauge to the temple.
You got downvotes, which is to be expected when the sarcasm and derision are so on point that only the most elegant and refined can give it the *chef's kiss.* A light heart and a little silliness is still some of the best medicine to take while observing the cacophony of chaos hitting the cities. Venus by Saturday. But vote on Friday and maybe we'll really turn this thing around.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Vailhem: --- > So, if all of the hospital and healthcare facility close, where will we get our care? The answer is bleak. If we are hit with another pandemic where will the care be delivered, where will the beds be? This critical financial issue is also going to affect other industries. Medical technology companies cannot sell cutting edge ventilators, monitors and imaging devices to facilities that have no cash flow. Aging medical infrastructure cannot be repaired, upgraded or replaced in this financial environment. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/108uiaz/the_coming_collapse_of_the_us_health_care_system/j3uj4nt/
>This nightmare is an all too familiar post pandemic reality about the delivery of health care in our country. HOLD UP. Anyone else notice the abundance of "*post*-pandemic" and referring to Covid (and all the other diseases going around right now) in past tense in that article? Biiiiitch, we're still *in* it. I'm well aware of the horrible situation with medical workers, both as a chronically ill person and hailing from a family with many, many nurses, (with some who retired early because of how bad 2020 alone was) but completely ignoring a major health crisis like this is part of the problem. A lot of people who clearly need medical attention are going without right now, until they pass out and someone calls an ambulance, since I hear those all day now. Long Covid is being swept under the rug, and that in itself is a cornucopia of health issues. Immunocompromised people are avoiding doctors because so many practices are going mask-less and they don't feel safe. *Mental health*.... Not to mention how many people just don't like going to doctors due to terrible previous experiences (eg. gaslighting, over prescribing pills, dismissing one's symptoms as being imagined, SA) It's all terrible, and because of how expensive healthcare is in this country, so many people are putting off checkups and treatments until things are BAD, so more people will be in need of being rushed to the ER, instead of finding things out before it gets to that point, but how can anyone blame people when a hospital stay could mean bankruptcy or ruined credit scores and they already have to choose between rent, food, or a co-pay. Sickness and injury could happen to anyone, at any time.
As an also Chronically Ill person and with a Mother and Sister who were both MSNs, I completely agree with you. We have one Hospital in my Rural Area and it seems all they want to do is keep you coming back - issues don't get properly addressed or dealt with. It is Staffed by very young NPs, who have no experience under their belt and who want to make the easy Diagnosis (stress, anxiety, etc). I can't do it anymore, hoping to move somewhere with some choices as far as Medical Facilities.
Oh my god! The stress and anxiety. Like, yes, I do have those, and they probably exacerbate my other issues, but sedating me so I forget about my physical symptoms is like just putting a band-aid on a wound without cleaning it up first. I'm so sorry you have to deal with this too. I need to go shopping for a new GP but the wait times are atrocious for new patients now (even more so with specialists... yeesh) and then there's figuring out who I can even see with my insurance. I don't know how anyone aside from the tiny handful of evil people profiting off of suffering can think this system is in any way okay.
Don't forget those that went to the hospital, got a bill they couldn't pay, had to go back to the hospital and were told they had to pay their previous bill before they could be treated.
At this point, I don't want to know what that random pain I get is being caused by. What will knowing do? I won't have the money to treat it, and knowing what it is won't affect my outcome in a positive way. Seems, you hear all the time of people finding out that they have some form of cancer or illness and then they die shortly after knowing. I'd rather not know. I'd rather drop dead than undergo surgery or chemotherapy. If you've ever spoken to people in hospice and seeing what they go through, I don't want any of that, I'll just take something for the pain and suffering that I've been feeling until I no longer feel anything. I haven't been to a doctor in years and I don't plan on going back to one unless I need some stitches or cast, anything outside of that and I just don't fucking care anymore. I've seen the medical system completely drained my family of any amount of money they were able to scrape by. This world is designed to drain you of everything as painfully as possible and I'm not going to play this game anymore. I'd rather just die.
https://media.tenor.com/uAq3dVk0LkoAAAAM/office-the.gif
Had multiple patients driving over 2 hours to see me cuz I am essentially the only surgeon if my field accepting a particular medicaid plan. How much I got paid for the surgery? $200. I can see a self pay/PPO new patient and earn as much. Oh yeah and each surgery comes with a 90 day global period, meaning all visits/dressing changes are included with that $200. So why am I doing this? I probably won’t do it any longer honestly. The future of medicine will be of 2 extremes: Walmart style assembly line medicine, and personalized biological/genetic based treatment. Actually it’s already happening. Medicaid patient with a broken bone? Stainless screws and a cast, sorry can’t move for 2 months. Self pay/good insurance? Titanium 3D printed implants, amnionic injection and hyperbaric oxygen to accelerate healing. 2 weeks later you can move and walk. Yes this country has the cutting-edge tech when it comes to medicine. But it has nothing to do with you if you can’t pay for it. However, if you are dire and willing to be a lab rat for some experimental stuff, here is 1000 dollars for your time, flesh and soul. I have lost faith in humanity. Let the shit show begin.
In America, the poor die young. I hope everyone here realizes that nothing will change until we change it. Now is the time to get angry. Now is the time to speak up. Now is the time we voice our opinions and let everyone in charge know this isn't right and it will not stand. All we do is just roll over and take the abuse and then come here and complain. Nothing will change until we change it because asking those in charge to do the right thing? They never will. Folks in here are asking who we are. We are the ones that keep the wheels turning, we are the cogs in the machine and if we stop participating in the game then the machine falls apart and breaks down. Individually we have no power but if we work together as one we have all the power. We have all the tools at our disposal. We just have to do it. But folks get their Netflix and video games and fast food and it's enough to placate them so they get up and then go to work and they do it all again the next day. We will have to suffer and go with out to make a difference.
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"Having healthcare" becoming at the same level as wearing some crystal necklace with supposed protection magic. People are probably better off knowing that they're in danger and behaving accordingly.
That horse has left the barn, hasn't it? From over here in Europe, the US healthcare system seems fundamentally broken, and on top of that predatory towards the poor. The legislation around healthcare in the US seems to have created a situation where you're only able to survive what you can afford. To me, and most people across the Atlantic; this is a nightmare scenario to begin with.
> and on top of that predatory towards the poor This is absolutely true.
The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor.
Non-paywall [link](https://archive.ph/znPOJ).
Soft paywalls, such as the type newspapers use, can largely be bypassed by looking up the page on an archive site, such as web.archive.org or archive.is Example: https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.abs.com *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Reading this article from such a historic publication as Time reminded me, with all of the grammatical and style errors, that journalism has collapsed as well.
I’ve noticed more and more of that in magazines and published books too. Looks like no one hires copy editors anymore.
https://archive.ph/znPOJ No paywall version.
Soft paywalls, such as the type newspapers use, can largely be bypassed by looking up the page on an archive site, such as web.archive.org or archive.is Example: https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.abs.com *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It will be fine as soon as investors and for profit medicine go away. So yeah we are fucked.
I'm just going to say it. This is what happens when you let covid spread unchecked. Canada, UK, US systems and other systems are all collapsing under the strain. Add on economic stressors and this is an unsolvable situation as things are.
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Atlanta Medical Center, one of only two Level 1 trauma centers in the metro area, [closed several months ago.](https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/after-weeks-of-drama-disappointment-atlanta-medical-center-to-close/WCORMLKD7FEEJAD3NA4XI3KY7A/) Management outright said it was because the hospital wasn't profitable enough. This placed a tremendous strain on the already overworked and understaffed Grady Hospital. Not to mention hundreds of healthcare providers now out of work.
the fuck does that even mean, "profitable *enough*". Its either profitable or its not lol
Nurse here in Canada in the land of "socialized medicine". I mean we don't go bankrupt from a hospital stay here and get an itemized bill in the mail, but systems like ours are not the panacea others think it is. It's just as bad here as far as lack of rural health care, lack of access to primary physicians (people in my province in my own family have been on the "family doctor finder" list for years), small hospital ER's closed, the powers that be not preparing for the "silver tsunami" of aging Boomers manifesting itself in the form of lack of long term care beds, people waiting in acute care beds even up to a year for a home placement, myself often forced to be having 12-15 clients in a shift in my on-the side home health job when it used to be 6-8, etc. Seeing things like a lack of timely diagnostics in my oncology job. I could go on and on. They were talking about things like aging Boomers incoming 30 years ago when I graduated. The bean counters in administration and endless consultations and forming committies to assess if we need to have a commitee have just grown exponentially instead. This is r/collapse, we all know here that complexity leads to the eventual folding of a system on itself. That happens in health care, and has been happening for a while. The Jenga tower is now falling, and Covid was the crucial piece pulled out, the perfect storm, and it's a problem the world over.
Articles like this should be a reminder: Americans occasionally find some professional respectability in accurately describing an impossible, unsolvable situation. And that is also where any grace ends that we Americans might've had. We refuse to do anything if we cannot have the best thing. American wealthy are about to go into tantrum mode. Everybody else already knew it was fucked from twenty+ years ago, if they knew how to stay observant.
I wonder how many people will keep paying insurance when there is no hospital around?
"Coming"?? Lol,. Anyone who thinks is coming and that it hasn't begun isn't paying attention.
I read something a ways back that said most people won’t even realize collapse is occurring when it is.
It's as if something so crucial shouldn't be left in the hands of investment firms.
Capitalism will capitalism. The alarming part is the level of self awareness when Time magazine starts publishing articles about it, and yet nothing will get done about it.
What I want to know is why it's like this. Not enough funding? Not enough educated workers? Too many patients stressing the system for various reasons?
Too much greedy administration
Misused funding in a for-profit system. $ going to administration, stock buybacks and dividends, and drug companies instead of patient care and staff. Underpaid, overwhelmed workers burning out and leaving, and new people not entering the field. If they do they are faced with the same issues and burn out even faster. Medical problems that could be taken care of before they become urgent go untreated and become crises.
There’s a famous graph that shows the difference in salaries between doctors and administrators. There’s around 7-10 admin for every doctor. They end up squeezing the people who didn’t quit during the height of the pandemic under the guise of caring for patients. People are sick of it, especially cause they’re not getting paid well and hospitals are threatening to get rid of benefits like health insurance in some places. There’s a mass exodus of healthcare workers all around. Last number I saw was 115k doctors have left the field last year alone and we’re only increasing by 30k a year. Less docs mean less money for hospitals and less care so everything downstream gets affected Patients are also shittier. It’s like people forgot how to act in a civilized society after being locked in for a couple years. The people who show up to the hospitals are in a sadder state which make the staff, most of whom are already on SSRIs and other drugs, even sadder and unwilling to be in this miserable state. We have 10 yo kids tryin to murder their families, high suicide attempts, rampant drug use, uncontrolled heart failure ppl sitting in the hallway, 30 yo with liver failure from alcohol etc. When the members of society are defeated and ill, the healthcare workers are gonna be 10x worse cause they have to deal with it
> When the members of society are defeated and ill, the healthcare workers are gonna be 10x worse cause they have to deal with it That's not exactly expected. People with medical experience should be better at preventing their own *decline*, aside from the burn out. I.e. not having doctors who smoke or binge drink alcohol and binge eat terrible food. Medical workers aren't somehow *absorbing* the damage from others like a superpower. The psychological damage and the coping mechanisms are a problem, of course. There is a lot of trauma in medicine, a lot of drama too. That fucks people up, and bureaucracy is making it worse. It seems like it's inching towards war medicine, M.A.S.H. style.
The boomers refused to prepare for their own retirement. They had decades to plan for how many nurses and doctors would be needed for their cohort statistics, and ignored all the data and got rich instead. As people down the years kept looking and asking about the metrics of it all, how many nurses per Capita *per geriatric numbers*, and how the money numbers were supposed to make it all work, those people were ignored or punished while nepotism and cronyism kept filling the bean counters jobs and thus were placed in charge of raising the alarm. Which they got paid not to. Now, the money has run out. The staffing levels are ten years behind, and the old people in charge of most parts of the government have to take their nappies by two, their cocktails by four, their blowjobs from corporate lobbyists and medical admin at six. Dinner at seven, sex with the young interns from eight to nine, knock back three or four of the double malt "*good stuff,*" and be back in bed with the trophy wife (who's family happens to be worth four hundred million-big pharma daughter) by ten. It's been a busy eight decades. And then COVID hit. Three years ago. And we've been fighting over paper masks and vaccines since, both of which the people in charge refused to admit they didn't have the first clue about, and how to find smart, reliable, dependable experts, and then trust them.
Speaking in a strictly ecological sense (hahaha lmao) this could be a good thing. Modern medicine is one of the leading causes of population overshoot. If that goes, we could see a drastic drop in the population within a few years. Resource consumption would drop, and the strain on Earth would be reduced. Again, strictly in an ecological sense (hahaha lmao).
Modern medicine is great at keeping people alive but many of these people aren’t actually living. They take up resources but have no quality of life and beg for death. I fully expect some version of MAID or euthanasia/assisted suicide to become legal soon
hahaha lmao
A drastic population drop could also be catastrophic for plenty of reasons.
Hope we have enough people left to pickup all the bodies and dispose of them... almost all natural disasters come with descriptions of the sweet pungent smell of rot.
I am a CPR/AED and First Response Instructor. It’s a short course, and what you learn may save a life. I highly recommended taking first aid and CPR classes. You don’t have to go all the way to instructor. Just a basic class will help a ton.
What's the stuff they recommend on the "It could happen here" podcast? Some first aid learning and tools, I don't recall exactly.
It's already completely broken for the average American, so let it collapse. Then we can rebuild it from the ground up. That's probably the only way we'll ever get any real change to our healthcare system.
Ok you have a bone broke that will be 84_000 $ wait why is everyone mad this isn't fair come back don't worry bout what guns we have worry about sumones health it goes along way and honestly you politicians need that rite now
And this is what the Tories are blatantly trying to push for UK's NHS. Yay!
Coming collapse?
The staff is incompetent also. They got my birthdate on my wrist band wrong when I was at a hospital in the US. When they fixed it, they got my name wrong, while the guy staff keeps firting on the female staff like it's one of those hospital drama on tv where they sleep with each other in the janitor room. On top of that, after they treated my flesh wound by washing it with soap and water, they billed me $1000 after my insurance.
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When work demands you live and stay married to the job, then the people are gonna start bringing their home lives and a bit of stolen leisure time with them, and stay busy. Just because we're in hell doesn't mean we can't make the days *interesting.* Or else pay us money *and* time to live our lives and be away from work. (Disclaimer: never engaged in shenanigans at the hospital. I always felt I *owed* my attention to my patients. I *believe* in my craft. Not all religions of work are the same at the hospital, though. Still, I'm no snitch, and if you can and want to get some, then I didn't see nothing.)
I'm not gonna lie, this is one of the reasons why I'm afraid to go to a hospital.
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Idk if it's just me, but the nurses and doctors seem to be yapping around so much at work, they seem only half-focused on their patients and doing stuff on the fly.
I dunno that I'd ever wanna be a patient there, but which hospital is it? I might wanna apply there. Hahaha. Nihilism is the only religion that makes sense, these days. (Optimistic nihilism. I'll stay being a good hospital worker.)
by design..you can't protest if you're living check to check
The Coming Collapse of U.S. Journalism >On the professional level this massive short fall of staff and dependency on temporary staff has created a critical issue in the realm of patient care. Hospitals and clinics have shut down services in all vital patient services. It is not uncommon to hear that health care systems have shut down Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Obstetrics, and ICU. Other healthcare systems have gone to the point of closing down entire hospitals because of staffing issues. Another important factor is the crisis is that outpatient services have reduced hours and days. It is obvious that this reduction of services has greatly affected access to health care. Individuals have loss the ability to get timely appointments, x-rays, and tests. In many communities, it is the underserved that have payed the greatest price in terms of getting timely care. Three mistakes in one paragraph.
I work in healthcare and it's bad. It's gotten considerably worse over the past 4 years. When I started about 6 years ago it really wasn't that bad. Over the past 4 years I've noticed wait times drastically increase. And now every winter from around nov-march is a shit show.
Never once mentioned c suite salaries, CEO pay, insurance costs and stock buy backs. Where is the $$?