How the CDC will destroy American healthcare

The CDC has a track record of incompetence - a better example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is hard to imagine:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. 

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

So while CDC doubtless has many employees dedicated to controlling disease, the organization is run by people motivated by typical Washington politicking.  That is a very plausible explanation of why CDC looks like it is trying to destroy the American health care system.

Consider:

• The CDC was the source of the estimates of Wuhan Flu death count (6.6M) that were used to shut down the American economy, and
• The CDC was the source of the rationale for the shutdown - slow the spread of the disease in order to reduce the maximum number of ICU patients to a level that would not cause the collapse of the health care system.

It looks like Mission Accomplished.  Hospitals are empty, Hospital ships are leaving the ports they were to serve due to lack of patients, doctors and nurses are being laid off.  The capacity of the health care system has clearly been preserved from the Wuhan virus.

But it has not been preserved from the CDC.  Where are the recommendations from CDC to allow elective surgeries, reopening closed hospital wings and saving hospitals from bankruptcy?  The World wonders.  Hospitals from sea to sea are in precarious financial straits, due to the lockdown that was explicitly justified by CDC to prevent the same hospitals from collapsing.

But there's more, so much more.  Consider:

• Most people in the United States get health insurance as a benefit from their employer.
• By the end of this week, probably 30M people will have been made unemployed due to CDC's recommended economic lockdown.
• The average number of people in the typical US household is 2.5.  Taking an estimated 1.5 employed workers per household, this means that by Friday probably 50M people will lack health insurance.

But those 50M people will need health care.  They just won't be able to pay for it.  Hospitals must (by law) provide services anyway, and so hospitals that are already in financial trouble due to CDC's recommended lockdown will face a flood of additional non-paying patients.

Oops.

Now none of this is controversial, although no doubt CDC would engage in a lot of ass covering to try to cover up all their past fear mongering.  The implications are inescapable - the cure for American healthcare is worse than the disease.  CDC is burning the village in order to save it.

Relax, we're doctors ...

We don't even need to go into motivations, because they're entirely irrelevant.  It doesn't matter whether CDC is doing this because they're Deep Staters who hate Donald Trump and want to take him down, or whether they see this as an opportunity to collapse the health care system and have the Government take it over, or whether they're just a bunch of incompetent nincompoops who rose to control the agency due to superior bureaucratic infighting skills - none of this matters.  What matters is that CDC's recommendation is causing what is clearly a worse outcome for this country than just letting nature take its course.