Ideally we would treat hospital capacity the same way. In good times, everyone gets a private room.
It's changed my perspective on efficiency. There are some forms of inefficiency that can provide a buffer if something goes wrong.
Though Americans were probably least affected by WW1 and WW2 of most war participants. Go ask some people in Russia for a better example.
Eg flush toilets are a great time saver. But they use a lot of water.
If we had a drought tomorrow, we could switch to compost toilets. They are more hassle to use and maintain, but use basically no water.
Which one is more 'efficient' depends on the relative scarcity of water vs time.
I mean I'm all for having excess hospital capacity (and excess capacity for a lot of things), but at the same time who is going to pay for it?
This has been the problem before cloud computing; companies had to set up servers and the like for the worst case peak capacity workload, meaning that usually they'd only be operating at 10-20% of capacity.