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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

This so much. The system is absolutely corrupt and broken to the core. Poor leadership exacerbates the problem but it is not the fault of poor leadership. We've merely been coping with the horrible brokenness of our system for decades.

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I see this logic a lot and I don’t understand it. The current administration dismantled the departments we needed, left whole organizations leaderless, and prompted the brain drain of nearly 1500 scientists from the federal government.

... yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?

> yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?

No, they're not blameless, they did all of those things. What is more worrying is a structure wherein actions as sweeping and dangerous as these are possible.

I see posts like this quite a bit, seemingly as a defense of the administration which is known for pushing deep cuts in various institutions, bungling messaging and/or outright lying about the state of affairs, among a litany of other issues which are exceedingly well documented.

If we were to treat the US as a business (as the President would want, apparently), poor leadership is the reason why we're going bankrupt both economically and socially. His actions are akin to cutting the QA department across your various software teams because 'their duties are redundant and can just be done by the developers instead', then encountering a crippling bug that could've been fixed by having QA at inception.

this is a ridiculous statement, you constantly refer to "him", i can only persume you are referring to our current president. You do know that the U.S. has been increasing debt since way before his tenure, right?

It largely the fault of the current leadership as well as the political party in power. In last 20 years they have destroyed institutions when in power and stopped the other political party to revive them when they were not in power. All the government lockdowns and blocks when Obama/Democratic party wanted to spend money on healthcare are there to see. Though Democrats are not blameless nor is the American public for allowing this to happen.

Spending money on healthcare wouldn't have helped. You could treble the capacity of the healthcare system and it wouldn't make that much of a difference. No system is ready for 1-3% of the population suddenly requiring weeks of time in a hospital bed.

The countries that are coping with this aren't doing so by putting everyone in great, well funded hospitals. They are avoiding people getting sick through combination of border control, cheap & quick medical testing and infectious disease specialists in key positions.

Spending money on healthcare would have helped. Actually would help now currently in the us doctors and nurses are complaining about lack of protective wear. In reality it is available but hospitals are not buying and providing them to it staff as they are expensive. Had US been investing on healthcare hospitals would not be worried about running out of funds and not protectings its doctors and nurses.

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