Turns out the healthcare systems didn't get overloaded by just the virus, but also the years or decades old issues bubbling under the surface.
Nurses all the way in Finland are voting with their feet as well. Management that isn't up to par, working hours, pay... David Graeber's essays about how caring work is both underpaid and underappreciated rings true.
and if you thought spinning up a chip fab in Texas is taking too long, wait until you try to solve the problem of spinning up more doctors. the residency program that takes up years of their schooling relies on having other doctors mentor them.
The nursing shortages are entirely due to the fact that these nurses have left bedside care due to the BS they have to deal with from understaffing, poor compensation, terrible shifts/hours, to abusive management and patients.
The "nursing shortage" is as much a myth as the current labor shortage. There's only a shortage of nurses at current pay rates and working conditions.
The private insurance companies are a big factor driving the consolidation, too. As the care networks consolidate their negotiating power, it gives them more and more of a competitive advantage over their smaller competitors, who have relatively less ability to negotiate good rates. That, in turn, leads to them having to drop off of the insurers' networks, which then results in patients being directed elsewhere.
I certainly don't want to say that government influence has no influence, but the brand of capitalism that sees government as the source of all evil is more about politics than economics. Economically speaking, cartels and informal cartel-like systems can be just as harmful. You don't get a healthy, well-functioning market by indiscriminately yanking any one lever; you get it by carefully tending the garden, and balancing a lot of competing considerations.
But what you can absolutely do is call and ask. Assuming you have the time to do so, of course. Urgent care does have a distressing tendency to be urgent.
And it is wise to do so when you can. For a really pedestrian example, it's worth asking your pharmacist about the retail price of a drug before paying. If the retail price is lower than your prescription plan's copay - something that happens quite often - then there's no sense putting it on your insurance. And no, I don't think it's the pharmacist's job to keep track of that. The elephant in the room in this discussion is that American culture already does way too much shitting on service industry workers. We need less of that, not more.
Private hospitals in particular are never going to be particularly amenable to keeping the kind of slack that would be required to handle a pandemic. They barely keep enough staff for normal operations.
testing tests all patients being admitted to the hospital
no wonder they are overworked