[ExI] perspective on covid

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sun Mar 8 16:55:48 UTC 2020


> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] perspective on covid

On Sun, 8 Mar 2020 at 16:06, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>... OK, now what is the right move?  I am not talking about government, 
> for I don’t see what they can do really and that is a different question...How much more do you pay for what you 
> think might be a better more-accurate kit?
>

>...The basic problem for the USA is that health and medicine are run by for-profit corporations.
(As is the government as well, of course)  ;)
...
>...There is no point in blaming this bad situation on any particular president. This has been building up for many years.

BillK

_______________________________________________


BillK, I would go along with the notion, but for the alternative being worse.  The US government has been living on borrowed money for decades and is nowhere close to paying for what it is already trying to do.  Add to that the current situation where the US government is at war with itself with peace nowhere in sight.  We are thankful for a for-profit medical system, as opposed to the alternative, which is probably none at all.

As we have discovered, of course there is way too much money in politics, and there is no known way to counter that.  If we try to put limits on campaign donations, it doesn't stop billionaires from spending their own money on their own campaigns: our first amendment allows them to buy ads for anything they want, including promoting their own political interests.  There is no stopping that by any means.  A recent good example: a US candidate spent half a billion dollars on his own campaign.  We are told he could have given each man, woman and child in America a million dollars and still had lunch money left over.  {8^D

Assuming the US Fed cannot help in this situation, I am pondering what happens when we have all these covid test kits available, varying prices, unknown error rates, counterfeits everywhere (Amazon.com can't tell the difference either (I bought some products just last week which are probably counterfeit.))  This situation could become a hell of a lot worse than it already is.

spike




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