Sharing limited resources is a major role of the government, and managing hospital capacity seems to fall under “promote general welfare” to me.
My $0.02
If the pandemic could be fixed by the government managing individual behavior we’d be done with it by now.
Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown.
As far as I understand from talking with doctors, at no time within the last year have hospitals been at maximum emergency covid capacity, as in hospital beds in the hall ways, cafeteria, etc. This tells me that we are close to the amount of beds we need, and it would be feasible to build out additional capacity quickly, relieve the strain, and get back to normal.
This is not something the government can do. It's not something anyone can do. What you're asking for (though you may not know it) is for their to suddenly be more nurses and medical practitioners. That's not a thing that can just suddenly happen, or even happen with 2-3 years of prep. You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.
Now there are lots of short term fixes the government has done, such as activating the national guard in locations (to reduce non-medical load on nurses) and hospitals can pause elective services to free up space and time, but that has huge downsides since it means people get life saving nonemergency surgeries like cancer removal.
Similar things were said for the vaccine.
There is so much gatekeeping in the medical community that is not totally necessary. A doctor or nurse that immigrates to the US from a different country which has better health care than we do cannot practice were without jumping through tons of hoops. That is a pretty straightforward way the government – in a state of national emergency mind you! – could instantly and functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.
But yes. Yes, I'm advocating that people be just a little bit more open minded and flexible about this issue and, ideally, the so many others like it. Sometimes it's quite depressing to consider the giant gap between how society functions today and how it could function if it operated by different rules.
To give a couple examples. If a nurse moves to the US and learns he can't practice without going back to medical school, he may opt instead to work a different job and defer his medical career. If a doctor moves to the US and is in the same position, she may choose to remain a stay-at-home mom and let her husband be the primary breadwinner.
There's also the arbitrage aspect here: globally we may have a healthcare worker shortage, but it may be more severe in one place than another. Reducing the friction involved in moving the workforce could allow workers that are in relative over-supply to move to an area with relative under-supply, improving the overall efficiency of the system.
New York and New Jersey did this. In early 2020 (so two years ago). Despite this, they ran into extreme shortages. So now that we've done that, what next?
> If a doctor moves to the US and is in the same position, she may choose to remain a stay-at-home mom and let her husband be the primary breadwinner.
And is she just going to suddenly start working if the licensure requirement goes away? Some might, but a lot won't because they are already parenting. This is what I mean by these policies require years to have an impact.
How long would it take to train someone from a nursing adjacent field to treat 95% of what they are likely to see when treating a covid patient? Is anyone even asking that question? If not, why not?
It seems like we’re willing to take drastic action when it comes to mandate public behavior, but not when it comes to reforming bureaucracies, processes, and regulations.
I would love to see stats on that. From what I can tell, the actual percentage of medical practitioners quitting due to vaccine mandates is very small. My family work in the medical field in a red state and the set of people actually quitting over the vaccine requirement (as opposed to making a lot of noise and then deciding unemployment is unattractive) is tiny, but this may not be representative.
Punishing the public with these awful mandates because “it’s too hard” is a huge failure of our government.
Sure. It's a pretty delicate balance between individual liberties and preventing bad collective outcomes, though.
If you lock down 340 million people for a week-- maybe the net effect is stealing 3.5 days of life's "enjoyment" or "quality" from each. That's 3.3 million years of quality life taken.
You need to save 20 years of quality life for 165,000 people to break even. In the first wave we probably exceeded that benefit, but it's highly doubtful any subsequent time passes that bar.
And, IMO, if there's ever anything close to a "tie", you need to favor individual liberty.
Maybe making people mask "costs" 0.2 days per week-- much smaller cost, but also a smaller effect. I think it's still justified, but only barely... It won't be soon.