My uncle was outside that age group but died last summer of a heart attack —- due to Covid. All the ICU beds in his area were occupied by Covid patients.
They’re not even talking about rescheduling the hernia surgery anytime soon - he’s making do with a compression band.
This is why it is other people’s business whether someone is vaccinated.
The closest is the following: “It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
The person quoted isn’t commenting on hospitals at all. For example my uncle doesn’t have COVID on his death certificate but his doctor says that his case was simple enough that he could have been saved had he been able to be admitted.
The person I'm replying to mentioned "hospital overcapacity".
“Fortunately” (well for this argument anyway) there are natural experiments going on (including between US states, between counties in large states like California, and between European countries) that appear to demonstrate that vaccination does in fact reduce hospitalization
Nearly universal: there are, by many estimates, at least tens of thousands of people who fall through the cracks - mostly (former) small business owners, other independent contractors, and widows of government employees who cannot afford their private insurance anymore, and are too old/unemployed to require a Krankenkasse to take them in.
Doctors own their own practices, or are employed by practices or hospitals. They have the choice to not accept Krankenkasse repayment rates, in which case they can only accept private patients (privately insured, or self-paying).
Germany's health economy looks more like the US than it does the UK. Overall, it is less expensive for similar quality, and American-style ruinous 6-figure bills are unheard of.
In the US you realistically need a 4y education to be a nurse, so we're looking at a really slow change even if it existed.
If they routinely overbuilt then cost would go up even more. I think this approach is reasonable for any business,* whether private or public hospital.
The Covid surge isn’t something you can plan for, nor could you really build ICU capacity quickly enough for.
Also there’s a systems issue: the ICU pressure shouldn’t even exist to the degree it does as we have a “defense in depth”: vaccination. But for some reason people aren’t using that defense, which simply makes things worse for the rest of us.
* not getting into the cost issues in general, just addressing your specific comment.
Look at how many fewer deaths there are in countries with universal healthcare. Maybe when we don’t have to pay useless middlemen like insurers then we can spend the money to hire more healthcare workers. I think it’s just our for-profit healthcare is always going to provide the bare minimum for the highest cost—-and is woefully unprepared for this pandemic.
It's reasonable for business, but not reasonable for society (because healthcare should be more risk adverse than a business). That's why the hospital system for op of this thread, which is German, isn't a business, and why they get to complain about how it's deployed
Governments are not immune against financial considerations any more than the private sector is. For example the transportation ministry/department has a figure at which a life is valued and won’t build a road improvement if the cost/mile exceeds that.