Posted on 03/13/2020 8:28:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Italy's in dire need of help.
Its health care system is collapsing. The coronavirus has put the whole country in quarantine. There are now 15,000 cases, along with 1,018 deaths, the last 24 hours bringing in 188 more. The casualty count is the highest outside China. And it's spreading fast. Until a few days ago, the problem as concentrated in the north. Now, it has spread throughout the whole country.
Anyone with a heart can feel pity and an urge to help them. They need help, bad.
But don't go asking the European Union.
Turns out the open-borders globalist set-up is stiffing the Italians in their hour of need:
First, the EU created the problem by failing to shut down their borders with China, enabling its spread into Italy in the first place. While President Trump was acting swiftly to protect America from the lethal virus, the European Union was saying there was no crisis and calling Trump a xenophobe.
Now, with Italy hit hard based on that hate-Trump 'logic', its medical system is overwhelmed. Its doctors and nurses are exhausted. There's not enough equipment or supplies, and the patients keep coming. Health care is being doled out by triage, old people being told 'no health care for you.' The Italians are appealing for help with masks, surgical equipment, doctors, anything that will enable them to get through it and save human lives -- and the EU is not giving it.
David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner has a must-read column on how the EU is leaving Italy to fend for itself in its hour of need.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
According to this disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal, there are signs of a medical system failure, the same kind of thing that in past socialist hellhole regimes, has triggered man-caused famines.
SEE HERE:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-coronavirus-fate-is-already-sealed-11584025664
(EXCERPT)
Italy lags other large European countries in provision of acute-care hospital beds, furnishing 2.62 of them per 1,000 residents as of 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Germany its 6.06 and in France and the Netherlands its 3.15 and 3 respectively. That year, Italy devoted around $913 per capita to inpatient acute and rehabilitative care, compared with $1,338 in France, $1,506 in Germany, and $1,732 in the U.S.
What accounts for these divergences in health-care resources requires more study than a single newspaper column can provide, but a few early hints emerge. One is the observation that the U.K. and Italy are significantly more dependent on direct government financing of health-care than is France or Germany.
Government accounted for 79% of total health-care spending in the U.K. in 2017, according to Eurostat, and 74% in Italy. Germany and France both rely on compulsory insurance schemes with varying degrees of subsidy and government meddling, but outright government expenditure amounts to only 6% of total health spending in Germany and 5% in France. Covid-19 in this sense is a test of how much one trusts central health planners to make wise long-term decisions that boost resilience in the face of unusual dangers.
And look where the outbreak occurred here. In dirty filthy socialist Seattle, right next to Vancouver with massive Chinese illegal travel.
A bit disingenuous reporting here...
No nation who knows they could be next is going to send all their supplies to another nation... Reality is, what’s happening in Italy, could happen anywhere... Even in the US it would not be hard to overwhelm our health care system if we had a large outbreak.
There are only about 100k ventilators/respirators in the US... all it takes is more than 100,000 severe cases all at the same time nationally and folks will not be able to get treatment who would likely survive if they did, and thats the entire nation, regionally a hot spot could do the same thing to a subset of the country with far fewer cases.
I will happily disagree with the entire premise of the EU politically, but this article is nonsense. No nation is going to export their vital resource to another that they know they are very likely going to need... none.
The French actually have a fairly rational system of socialized medicine that leaves a large private sector intact and relatively free. If the US is doomed to socialized healthcare then that should be the model we pay attention to. Naturally our leftist Democrats want to copy the draconian English model that totally wipes out the private sector and gives the government total control.
never mind the fact northern italy evidently has a ton of chinese who are in the leather business and the italian ambassador to ireland states they believe it came from china via the textile industry:
“He added: “We should not over dramatise, when we get over dramatic we risk making mistakes and this is simply silly because we are in a good framework. We are in a country well equipped in terms of public health. We are in the European Union, and we are responsible for each other. It is a serious situation but we don’t want to transform it in to a drama when it is not a drama.”
He said northern Italy has close connections with China due to strong links in the textile trade.”
https://www.rte.ie/news/post/103346782/
Good post yours. An important function of conservatives is to stop liberals from carrying out their bad ideas. And when conservatives fail in that function, disaster awaits.
Italy is a perfect example of that. So is our West Coast.
I think you can still see private doctors in England.
I could be wrong, need someone who’s knowledgeable to weigh in here.
Its health care system is collapsing.
And so would ours if put under a comparable strain.
This is not a "socialized medicine is bad" thing. It is a capitalist bean counter thing. Because of the advances in surgical techniques that allow outpatient surgery, Hospitals have tailored their bed space to remain in the 90-95% occupancy rate range during normal times, leaving little capacity for disasters.
The bean counters say that if you have too many beds that are idle, you're losing money.
It's the same with equipment like respirators. You're not going to buy more respirators than you normally use, because a $150,000 respirator that sits in a closet unused is just a waste of capital. But then there is no excess capacity for times like these.
Maybe this pandemic will make the world re-think how they maintain contingent capacity for emergencies. Much could be learned from the Army, who know how to spin up hospital capacity on short notice due to combat operations, but must keep warehouses full of equipment unused during peace time.
If this outbreak could have happened in Southern California, or San Francisco where there is a good size Chinese populations, and lots of in and out.
US Officials here would have been saying the same thing, before the outbreak hit.
This article is political propaganda, just because its propagandizing something you agree with, doesn’t mean its not propaganda.
“I think you can still see private doctors in England.
I could be wrong, need someone whos knowledgeable to weigh in here.”
Yes you can. When I lived there we always went private for anything that wasn’t routine. Very high standard with private medical practice.
The EU was created to eliminate France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and the other member countries. It didn’t plan to do that right away. Instead, it chipped away at everything that constitutes a country: borders, taxes, ability to make laws that apply to the territory of the country.
The EU eliminated borders by declaring that there were no borders within the EU. So there was free movement between the countries in the EU. So whatever problem entered in France soon became Italy’s problem, and similarly for the other countries.
It mandated the display of the EU flag next to the national flag. It reduced the country designator on car registration plates to a small logo, barely visible.
It successfully weakened national identity.
The EU exists to expand its power and to become like the US federal government - a rolling monster that gobbles up the individual states’ identities.
The problem is the existence of the EU.
They’ve lost the UK.
Italy is begging for money.
Global economy is shaky.
US bans travel from Europe.
I’m hoping the EU crashes and burns in spectacular fashion.

The primary issue for Europe and its been going on for decades is there a bunch of selfish liberals and they dont have children
Add to that fact that theyre greedy and selfish they still want lots of money and so theyve imported wholesale labor from countries where people do have babies Muslim countries African countries and Asian countries
And now of course theyre just reaping what they sewed weve seen it for the last 10 years as the Muslims have taken over wholesale parts of France the Netherlands and other countries in a full on writing
But now we just get the clear example of what open border immigration policies get you
And by the time this all gets worked out and we get to the general election the whole subject of borders and border security is going to be front and center
And guess which parties going to be on the side of open borders illegal aliens and everybody come in and there is no crime?
It sounds churlish, I know, but I also hope what you hope, that the EU crashes and burns in spectacular fashion.
Death of New World Order bump for later....
It's almost amusing. In any academic setting you can find a lot of selfish Liberals. And most of them worry about the environment. And about over-population. There are too many people. People cause problems. We need fewer people.
But if the selfish Liberals were to really look at Europe they might realize that not having children is a very bad idea.
Oh, there’s plenty of local (Seattle) travel also.
What they’re talking about in this article is nonsense. Every country was going to get cases. What really matters is how governments react. Do they take seriously and react with the full force of the government or do they buy the lie that it’s “just the flu”?
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