Discussion: Dallas Nurses Cite Sloppy Conditions, Changing Procedures in Ebola Case

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Discussion for article #228891

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So the people who attacked the CDC director’s Oct 12 “protocol breach” comment, where are they now?

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Modern day workers are free to individually negotiate pay, benefits, and working conditions with employers owned by venture capitalists.
Union representation of an employee is as outmoded as the concept of retirement with a decent pension.
Those workers who have safety or health concerns are silenced by a management policy of: “If you talk, you walk.”
The State of Texas has no OSHA program.
And so two nurses have been infected with Ebola. So far.

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It’s a little bracing to watch the news about ebola, followed by commercials about erectile dysfunction and chronic idiopathic constipation. As an African disease which seldom made the news and never ginned up demand for $12,000 shots, ebola looks a lot like the history of HIV, repeating itself.

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What we are seeing here is classic systems failure. The ‘system’ under scrutiny is our ‘corporate health care system’.

One of the foundations of systems theory is that every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that you see. Closely related to this is that the internal goals of a system trump the external goals.

In this case I suspect we are going to see that the public health goals of the individual hospital system were secondary to its ‘asset protection’ goals.

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The only reason to be in business is to make money.

Once upon a time, long long ago, there was a business concept that improving conditions for employees and customers would result in more money flowing back to the corporation. It made Henry Ford the richest man on Earth. It made America prosperous and strong enough to overcome the Great Depression and thoroughly defeat every enemy. Education, union representation, participation in democracy, and caring about others produced prosperity for all who cared to contribute their work. And the people lapsed into belief that the greatest generation of the greatest nation had secured a future where everything would just get better. And so the festering forces of evil were set free again to fearlessly proclaim the virtues of greed for another eighty years until the people once again remember what their great grandparents died for.

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This is upsetting, but reassuring, in terms of us not needing to redefine how the disease is spread.

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