https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
July 27, 2018
These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful.
Would any sane person choose America’s broken healthcare system over a cheaper, more effective alternative? Let’s see: the current system costs twice as much per person as the healthcare systems of our developed-world competitors, a medication to treat infantile spasms costs $8 per vial in Europe and $38,892 in the U.S., and by any broad measure, the health of the U.S. populace is declining.
This is how systems and nations fail: nobody chose the current broken system, but now it can’t be changed because the incentive structure locks in embedded processes that enrich self-serving insiders at the expense of the system, nation and its populace.
Nobody chose America’s insane healthcare system–it arose from a set ofinitial conditions that generated perverse incentives to do more of what’s failingand protect the processes that benefit insiders at the expense of everyone else.
In other words, the system that was intended to benefit all ends up benefitting the few at the expense of the many.
The same question can be asked of America’s broken higher education system: would any sane person choose a system that enriches insiders by indenturing students via massive student loans (i.e. forcing them to become debt serfs)?
Students and their parents certainly wouldn’t choose the current broken system, but the lenders reaping billions of dollars in profits would choose to keep it, and so would the under-assistant deans earning a cool $200K+ for “administering” some embedded process that has effectively nothing to do with actual learning.
The academic ronin a.k.a. adjuncts earning $35,000 a year (with little in the way of benefits or security) for doing much of the actual teaching wouldn’t choose the current broken system, either.
Now that the embedded processes are generating profits and wages, everyone benefitting from these processes will fight to the death to retain and expand them, even if they threaten the system with financial collapse and harm the people who the system was intended to serve.
How many student loan lenders and assistant deans resign in disgust at the parasitic system that higher education has become? The number of insiders who refuse to participate any longer is signal noise, while the number who plod along, either denying their complicity in a parasitic system of debt servitude and largely worthless diplomas (i.e. the system is failing the students it is supposedly educating at enormous expense) or rationalizing it is legion.
If I was raking in $200,000 annually from a system I knew was parasitic and counter-productive, I would find reasons to keep my head down and just “do my job,” too.
At some point, the embedded processes become so odious and burdensome that those actually providing the services start bailing out of the broken system. We’re seeing this in the number of doctors and nurses who retire early or simply quit to do something less stressful and more rewarding.
These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. The typical mortgage documents package is now a half-inch thick, a stack of legal disclaimers and stipulations that no home buyer actually understands (unless they happen to be a real estate attorney).
How much value is actually added by these ever-expanding embedded processes?
By the time the teacher, professor or doctor complies with the curriculum / “standards of care”, there’s little room left for actually doing their job. But behind the scenes, armies of well-paid administrators will fight to the death to keep the processes as they are, no matter how destructive to the system as a whole.
This is how systems and the nations that depend on them fail. Meds skyrocket in price, student loans top $1 trillion, F-35 fighter aircraft are double the initial cost estimates and so on, and the insider solutions are always the same: just borrow another trillion to keep the broken system afloat for another year.
The system isn’t broken, it is just too expensive.
Ask yourself why all those other systems seem to have so many of their people coming here for treatment they can’t get within their own systems that are so much cheaper?
A balance between affordability and availability is what needs to be sought after, not just cheaper.
Cheaper would make it more available. One of the biggest ways to make it cheaper is by massively reducing red tape and other various overhead crap. We would probably be able to attract more great minds to become doctors, nurses etc by simply reducing anything that doesn’t specifically address a persons health. Also, preventive care taking a stronger role in the health system instead of cut (surgery) or pop (pills).
How about enforcement of the GD laws!!!!!!!
Nobody chose the current broken system?
Well. Choice is one of the huge underlying myths, conceits, for sure. Broken’s not chosen – it’s chosen for.
Lemmings would not actually choose to cliff leap even if they did that (they don’t). “Choice” is really just nature, reflex, instinct.
Intuition, homogenized via emulation, monkey-see monkey-do, packs ever more emulators onto HMS Systems, until it capsizes…or finds the inevitable ice berg.
But moving counter-intuition, & “opposite George,” are not, cannot be, chosen either. Hands are dealt. Randomly. And most of those hands will always take the path of least resistance.
Cheetahs gotta cheat. Cheetos gotta couch…& euphemize, nobilify, pump up the volume, lie down with dogmas & wake up with gold fleeced.
Broken systems represent the culmination of this species preeminent feature. Reinvention of broken wheels is what karma chameleons are about. Fast & furious sequels without end.
But always, up ahead, there’s a signpost, relatively immovable object, with starstuff’s name on it. Supernova to supernova go whee. That’s the ride. And it’s always in the twilight zone.
The answer is simple. It is just that many do not want to admit to it. National Health care, single payer system works in the rest of the industrialized world and has worked for decades. It works at half the price. WTF more do you need to know? The longer you deny it, the longer these parasites can feed on you