Outsourcing for US Businesses A Path to Innovation and Growth

To use a simple example, any political system will produce houses, structures, and towns. So the government should work to make our towns more liveable, walkable, and beautiful. When high school students came to take their graduation photos at the Alberta Legislature, Jason Kenney would often say that there is something in the human heart that gravitates toward beauty. Our public facilities, including schools, churches, and government offices, should serve as sources of inspiration. We were able to construct this a century ago, with a fraction of the riches; there is no excuse for utilitarian architecture today.Sticking with politics, I recently took some loose rules for living in a democracy from the late Tony Benn, the great old man of the English Left. Benn preferred to place his trust in the rough and tumble of politics over unaccountable technocrats, unelected judges, and international organizations. He thought that anyone claiming to hold political power in a democracy should be asked five questions: "What power do you have? Where did you obtain it? In whose interests are you using it? To whom are you accountable? "How can we get rid of you?" The contemporary populist unrest that so disgusts our neoliberal establishment stems from the latter's inability to effectively address these issues, particularly the last two.

Continuing on a political note, Margaret Thatcher. 

famously (and possibly apocryphally) ended a policy conference by slamming a book of Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty" on the table and stating "this is what we believe." A similar declaration of my philosophy would be accompanied by a tall stack of Hopkins' and Larkin's poetry; Shakespeare; Boswell's Life of Johnson; smatterings of Augusto del Noce, Jacques Barzun, and Robert Nisbet; Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address; some Jane Jacobs and Simon Leys; Aquinas, Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno; and Nicolás Gómez Dávila's aphorisms.I mention Dávila last because one of his longer aphorisms is the most similar to my worldview: "To be reactionary is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools." The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a forgotten past, but rather a hunter of divine shades on the eternal hills."It may not amount to much of a ruling philosophy, but as a rudimentary and occasionally changing credo, I'll pit it against Crash Davis's. However, he was correct about AstroTurf and the designated hitter. When Ray DeMonia of Cullman, Alabama, suffered a heart emergency in August 2021, he was turned away from 43 hospitals across three states. He died after being moved to a hospital 200 miles away in neighboring Mississippi. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) collected public data1 to quantify the events that contributed to this specific tragedy. By mid-August, ICU capacity had dropped below 10% in five states, including Alabama and neighboring Georgia and Mississippi. COVID-19 patients used roughly half of the available ICU beds in these states.

The HHS dataset counts the number of. 

inpatient and ICU beds occupied by COVID and non-COVID patients in each state and at the majority of hospitals. This amazing tracking system, developed as part of the US federal government's effort to better analyze and manage hospital capacity during the pandemic, was initially deployed in July 2020. Despite a difficult beginning, Americans have had access to this high-quality summary of their country's healthcare capacity for more than two years.Individual tragedies abound in Canada: patients die in hospital waiting rooms, emergency rooms and intensive care units close, and chronically pressured health-care personnel burn out and resign. What we lack is hard data to see beyond this expanding collection of tales. Americans have access to detailed, near-real-time information regarding the state of their health-care system, which is nearly unthinkable in Canada.This is not to suggest that this country does not collect meaningful healthcare indicators. For example, the Canadian Institute for Health Information publishes annual reports2 on a variety of important metrics for health facilities across the country, such as emergency room wait times, hospital readmission rates, and patient satisfaction measurements. However, real-time indicators, such as COVID-19 hospitalizations in each province, are not available at the federal level. Scouring provincial websites or consulting third-party aggregators will only provide you with a fraction of the information that Americans usually have access to about their entire country.

Those who have worked closely.

data throughout the epidemic will not be surprised by the limits of Canadian healthcare data. In early 2021, the number of COVID-19 patients occupying ICU beds in Ontario served as the focal point for discussions about health regulations. Despite being the most closely studied value in the province, the publicly available data was inaccurate and hid the true impact of COVID-19 on the health-care system. Patients who no longer tested positive for the virus were deleted from the public total of COVID-19 patients in ICU, despite the fact that they needed critical care as a result of the disease. While the true count of COVID-19 patients in ICUs was used internally, these figures could only be obtained by copying statistics from slide decks that were infrequently shared on social media. These more precise figures would only be formally revealed to the public in April 2021, well into the province's third wave.In another case, British Columbia gained prominence throughout the pandemic due to its consistent hostility to transparency. The province used worries about "privacy" and "stigma" to avoid sharing more localized and relevant data about COVID-19 risk and vaccination, and at one point even decided to stop sending data to the federal governmentInadequate data collection, arbitrary confidentiality, and other hurdles to information availability are not new in Canada. However, the situation is especially significant in the healthcare industry. The justification is predictable: health is only the provinces' responsibility, thus we will always have to navigate through a patchwork of contradictory provincial data sources.