MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

In a couple of posts, I’ve mentioned that one of the wild cards in the 2020 election is the fact that the top candidates (to include Bernie Sanders at the time) were all in the high-risk demographic for COVID-19, which tends to be more fatal for elderly patients. Trump is the youngest of the bunch at 74, and both he and Biden are the oldest candidates in American history (so would Sanders if he was still running, obviously).

So considering that neither party has officially nominated their candidates yet, and as macabre as it may be, it’s worth asking now: what happens if one or both candidates either dies or is incapacited by COVID-19 before the conventions, or before the election, or between election day and the inauguration?

FiveThirtyEight explains the options here.

The TL;DR version: As it happens, both parties have backup plans, and have done for a long time. The biggest problem will be if the nominee dies too close to Election Day when the ballots have already been prepared with his name on them. The party would have to agree on a replacement in time to update the ballots, or at least make it clear to voters who their actual choices are. And then you have the problem of mail-in and absentee ballots.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of the article is this: in all of American history, this has never actually been tested. At most we’ve had to replace running mates at the last minute, but we’ve never had a scenario where a frontrunner dies before the convention or a POTUS nominee dies before the election.

Hopefully this year won’t be the first – not least because the American political landscape is already dominated by paranoid hyperpartisan batshit where the slightest irregularity will spawn a metric ton of half-assed conspiracy theories if the result is someone other than their preferred candidate – and that’s without the complication of COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing. If those conditions are still in place when it’s convention time – or on Election Day – people are likely to trust the results even less, unless the parties can make the process as transparent as possible. Which they probably won’t because lol no.

Put simply, you probably couldn't pick a worse year to experiment with this kind of thing. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that – the pre-plague situation was bad enough.

Keep yrself alive,

This is dF

Some people have been asking me about the Hong Kong healthcare model. And seeing as how US Republicans love to point our way whenever they want to “prove” that flat taxes and laissez-faire capitalism works a treat and the US should copy it, whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that we have socialized medicine, public housing and govt investment in infrastructure, I thought I’d oblige with a little info.

First of all, as you might expect, as a former UK colony, Hong Kong’s healthcare system is based more or less on the NHS (National Healthcare Satan) model. We have the Hospital Authority (HA), which runs the public hospitals off a budget that works out to something like 15% of the total govt budget. We also have about a dozen private hospitals.

It’s not single-payer as I understand the term (and I confess I don’t, really) – you either pay the doctor/hospital directly, or you hand them a medical insurance card and they submit the bill to the insurance company who then decides how much if any they’ll cover. Or you pay the bill and then submit it with a form to the insurance company for compensation (if any).

The good news is that the quality is overall pretty good (though certainly not perfect). The bad news is that we’re competing with Israel for the position of second-highest healthcare costs in the world after the US – which is problematic because while the private sector accounts for over half of primary-level care (which is pretty cheap), with the rest split between public doctors and Chinese medicine practitioners, the public sector handles over 90% of secondary care, which is way more expensive.

Ironically, the fact that we have the second-highest life expectancy is also creating a problem as the size of the elderly population grows. And for years the HA has been under a lot of strain with the budget it has – a fact that was made all too clear with the SARS crisis in 2003.

So the HK govt has been looking at reform issues as well, though as far as I know they still haven’t come up with a plan. It may just be a question of better money management and interactivity with the private sector (at the moment they’re completely separate in terms of records, referrals, etc). But it’s worth pointing out we’re financing most of this on a flat-tax system in a city of 7.2 million people. So higher taxes are also a possibility.

I can’t say how much of this applies to the US, but there is a similar theme here: rising costs and system inefficiencies. If yr going to do universal healthcare, you need to get the money from somewhere, and with costs as high as they are, you need the most efficient system possible to deal with it. That’s why Medicare is the elephant in the room in the US healthcare debate, and it’s why I feel that one genuine criticism I’ve heard of the Obama/Demo plan to date is that they haven’t yet worked out a concrete way to fund it 100% yet – and in a way that allows for the likelihood that initially it’s probably going to cost more than they think.

That’s not an argument against reform, of course. And the current system, frankly, isn’t going to get any better without at least the threat of govt intervention. Here on the LJ, bedsitter23 and dydan have good insider explanations as to why. But if the HK example is anything to go by, a govt plan by itself is no guarantee of healthcare costs going down, and it’s not an easy thing to keep in the black.

But then I know dick about healthcare, so don’t take it from me. I’d suggest reading this article to get a sense of what HK is up against, and this really long article from Paul Krugman and Robin Wells that breaks down the problems with the US healthcare system. If you can figure out what any of them are saying, let me know.

Okay, that’s all I got on healthcare. You may now go back to shaking yr fist at the television. I'll be back shortly with retro babe pictures or something.

Turn yr head and cough,

This is dF

Swine flu: we kicked its ass.




Okay, I’m exaggerating. But the guy who brought it here has fully recovered and no one else caught it from him, so everyone in the Metropark was released last night.

Naturally people (mainly a few of the Metropark “guests”) are complaining that the HK govt overreacted. I’ve heard the words “Draconian” and “civil liberties” chucked around a few times.

On the other hand, if the govt hadn’t quarantined the hotel, they would have accused of endangering everyone by not keeping the virus contained. And remember that they’ve heard that one before. Also, realistically the only way the guests would have felt the quarantine was justified is if they all got sick and died, so you might as well play it safe.

Granted, I can’t say for sure I’d have a sense of humor about it if I was one of the guests locked up in quarantine. That said, I also normally travel with books to read and a laptop, so as long as I have an Internet connection I’m good for a few weeks.

Anyway, it could be worse. We could have been in FEMA’s jurisdiction.

Looking forward to flu season.

Germ-free adolescents,

This is dF