Non-Profit

Written to a friend in a Facebook message, minor edits to remove specifics of the discussion.

A group of doctors and nurses (people who actually want to do something) argue over how to treat a patient (the Haitian people) and are limited by what they can get paid to do by the medical administration (government, UN) which is controlled by the insurance companies (funding agencies).

The doctors have greatest effect when the patient is in the ED - humanity trumps all, all EDs operate at a loss. When the patient becomes stable, the patient is moved up to Critical Care... and suffers the bureaucracy of the medical administration and the insurance companies.

The problem is consistently that not enough is done in the ED to assure the stabilization of the patient for the long term. That opportunity, sadly, is almost always squandered because of new patients arriving - or a definition of stability that isn't truly stable. The U.S. Military learned this lesson well after Vietnam, training medics and Hospital Corpsmen even better to assure better long term stability early and less dependency on V.A. Clinics later.

In the case of present Haiti, there is the physical insult (trauma) combined with the pre-existing depressed immune system (checks and balances of governance, not limited to government)where the body is attacking itself. Because of the poor immune system, foreign bodies were able to nestle into the body. Some did and do good things. Some did and do unhealthy things. Some, while doing healthy things, combine with others doing healthy things to create new problems (synergistic). Some unhealthy things, combined, create healthy things accidentally.

So while the patient is in critical care, the internal war continues. The medical administration and funding agencies keep pumping things into the body in a mad experiment without knowing what they are doing.

When I read this (hat tip to Michael Maranda), I immediately thought of the video of Sarah Silverman's ambitious plan for feeding the world:

Truth be told, if all religious institutions sold their most prized property there would probably be no hunger - for a while. Even so, there is some irony in that religions themselves typically have a lot of capital hidden away somewhere in the crockery. But so do a lot of other people.

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is something I still haven't seen - it's not even released on DVD as I write this - but the concept of replacing capitalism with democracy seems a bit peculiar to me. Even so, it has some allure because we all know that something is wrong.