In light of Fidel Castro’s death and the news that Venezuela is issuing new, higher-higher denominations of currency due to the triple-digit inflation that reduced the value of the country’s largest note to two U.S. cents, I’ve decided to republish an updated version of the following, popular blog post.
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Models. No, not the skinny kind in a magazine. But conceptual frameworks. Like global warming “models” or even Obamacare.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, U.S. rice farmers are raking it in on exports to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez’s legacy of socialism, in which large farms were nationalized, broken up and “redistributed,” together with food price controls resulted in the destruction of its farming industry. Similar top down management continued by his successor, Nicolas Maduro, ruined the beef, coffee, steel and sugar industries.
Humans are complex. Our interactions are complex. Outside of basic urges, like the drive to survive, we can’t, especially on a large scale, be modeled by policy wonks and other useless idiots.
Those who were surprised that employers turning to part time workers and temps to escape Obamacare were clueless.
Those who think that ACOs and hospital-centric healthcare have a long term survival rate are equally blind.
The key for doctors in Dallas and Des Moines and Detroit, and across the country, is to develop strategy that increases your chances of professional and economic survival in both the likely short lived hospital-centric world and in the physician-patient-centric one to follow.
Those in favor of Obamacare claim they did it to help the uninsured. Chavez and the Chavistas, like Castro, claimed that they took the steps they did to help the disenfranchised. But the disenfranchised have become even more so and everyone is suffering.
