https://www.wbaltv.com/article/covid-19-emergency-actions-ma...
Hospitals in my area have cut 20% of surgeries (ie: triaged out care to make room for COVID19). The governor has deployed National Guard to the hospitals to help out with tasks.
Are you just blind to the issues happening right now? This is happening, this is happening now. Take off your blindfolds and talk to a damn nurse or doctor. This is happening all over the place as far as the eye can see.
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Just call up your local-clinic and ask them for a flu-shot. Stand in line for 4-hours for things _COMPLETELY_ unrelated to COVID19, and come back and tell me that its fake. Go ask the receptionist "why is the line so long", and they'll tell you: COVID19.
I know because I done it. (Well, not for a flu-shot but for a TDAP. Nearly the same thing)
/s
That was an actual exchange I had with someone a few weeks ago with this same scenario. They'd gone from 'it's all faked' to "well, yeah, there may be people there now, and they're taking resources from non-covid patients, but the govt wants it that way, that's why they pay hospital more for covid patients! they're incentivizing people getting covid!"
I don't think it makes any sense at all, but interactions like these are more signs to me that it's harder to have meaningful interactions 'across the divide' these days.
Note that this varies by where you are. Locally, there is no health care crunch: it's easy to get a flu shot or other vaccine with no wait, and ICUs still have capacity despite a huge increase in cases. We're probably screwed in a few weeks since there's only about a 60% vaccination rate here and the most recent surge didn't start until maybe two weeks ago.
In the province of Quebec, where we have a highly vaccinated population, the intensive care units (ICUs) in all hospitals will be full within two weeks, if the rate of transmission and hospitalization continue this way. Demand greatly outstrips supply.
In Canada, the financial incentives for hospitalization and discharge are very different. Physicians get paid by a complex mix of hourly pay in addition to a fee-for-service schedule, both paid by the government. Hospitals get paid by the type of patient they admit, and their length of stay, but not always in a straightforward way.
In Canada, because of the remuneration system, physicians are the most influential decision-makers in deciding who gets to use the ICU. Roughly, no one doesn't get admitted "because they can't pay", and no one gets admitted "because they have money" .
Since hospitals are overwhelmed in Quebec, physician's incentive would be to discharge patients rather than admit. Their hourly wage wouldn't rise if they got more patients. Indeed, there is some evidence that as ICU capacity drops, physicians start discharging patients from the ICU earlier.
I should be fair to physicians in Quebec: their behaviour reflects a deep concern about the public health emergency rather than their financial gain.
I believe that, in Canada, all hospitalized patients in the ICU really need to be there.
Source: I have been studying hospitalizations due to COVID-19 illness in Quebec, Canada, and providing forecasts to the local government since the start of the pandemic.