The Trouble with Mercenaries

A Post with an important message, but One which loses contact with its central theme somewhere along the way. I will try in my poor way to get it back on track. A probable 70% of all medical needs could be handled by Nurse Practitioners rather than Doctors, with a probable 40% Savings in total Cost of Treatment. About 99.8% of all Nurse Practitioners have some form of Doctor fallback organized in the less than 2% of questionable Cases they examine. It is also true that Nurse Practitioners are about 980% as likely to proscribe a cheaper Drug over a high-priced Drug as is a Doctor; with probable irrelevance as to which Drug is most effective in Treatment conditioning. The availability of Nurse Practitioner clinic access is probably about 5 hours per day longer than is Doctor clinic availability. Nurse Practitioners, on the other hand, cost a probable half the Cost in clinic visit as that of a Doctor clinic visit. This is all a Sketch analysis by myself of current medical trends off the top of my head; Those who want more precise numbers should either collect the data, or pay for the Doctor services in the first place.

Mark Thoma does not focus on the real problem of Private Contractors supplying the Military in war zone conditions. The real Problem is lack of integration. The Military solves this Problem in the Short-term by over-Stockpiling of essential materials. This does not cure the long-term Problem of massive pilferage, and inadequate and unsafe storage conditions. Some Defense reports have listed up to 180 billion dollars worth of materials which cannot be found; they have disappeared into the War Zones, never again to be seen. Other Reports indicate that outside of facilities specifically delegated for habitation by American military personnel, almost all Rebuilding efforts endure shoddy construction, and maybe up to 90% of such facilities are in some way incomplete to the point of being ‘Mission defeating’. A real rationale can be made for an additional 150,000 Combat Support force in Iraq.

The real trouble with both preceding Paragraphs may lie in the lack of supervised Junior Command. The AMA could actually serve as a great unifying force in Medicine, if they formalized a medical structure under which Everyone must operate, instead of simply underwriting all deviant behavior of their membership. Placing all Servicemen and Contractors under the command of Zone Commanders, based upon High Command guidelines and Military Police supervision, could forestall Theft of military materials and Payment for incomplete efforts by Private Contractors. Mark Thoma suggests War Zone accountability is hard to ensure, it is not; the difficulty resides only in Command incompetence. lgl