 Okay, I want to talk a little bit about overloading the health care system. Here's the idea that there are limited number of beds in the United States in particular. Today there's only 2.8 beds per thousand, per thousand people, which is low, low as compared to many countries in Europe, for example. We don't have a lot of beds. We don't have a lot of ICU beds. And then we have respirators. There's a potential shortage of respirators. And hospitals are fairly efficient. So while there are 2.8 beds per thousand people, a lot of those beds are occupied. Just from regular, heart disease, cancer, people just being sick and being in hospital. And hospitals don't like to have lots of empty beds because it's hard to make money if there are a lot of empty beds, at least as the system exists today. So the fear is, and this has happened in Italy, clearly happened in Italy, is that so many people show up in the emergency room who need hospitalization because of coronavirus, that basically the hospital falls apart. They can't treat their cancer patients. They can't treat their heart disease patients. They can only treat a certain portion of their coronavirus patients. And people are dying. People are dying for a variety of different reasons that have nothing necessarily to do with coronavirus, but from the overload on the hospital system. And the ideas we want, and flattening the curve, the whole idea of flattening the curve is the idea is, we want to reduce the number of people. We want to spread it out. We accept that everybody's going to get it. We just want everybody to get it over a long period of time so that the pressure on the hospitals gets reduced dramatically. Now, somebody's asking about the April Chicago ERI event. You're probably here in the next day or two. I'm not supposed to publicly make an announcement, but you'll hear from the Institute in the next few days. But the way to do that, I think the primary way to do that is again, isolate old people. I know that sounds horrible, isolate old people. But yeah, it's for their own good. I mean, they should voluntarily want to do this. And again, old age homes and other facilities that cater to old people should voluntarily restrict access to them. And then, of course, if you are younger but have health problems, then don't go out. Isolate yourself. And it's hard. I know you might have a spouse that's traveling. But OK, life is a challenge. Sometimes it's a challenge. Somebody says 349 people died in Italy in the last day. Yeah, out of 60 million people. I mean, it's sad that 349 people died. But again, put it in perspective. And they were all over 80, almost all of them, over 70. You look at the list, they're all that way. Italy has the second highest percentage of old people in the world. All right, so let's go back to this bed's problem. So first, the way to deal with this is again to try to make sure that the people most likely to show up in hospital don't get sick. Second, let's ask a question. Why are there so few hospital beds? Why are hospitals not prepared? Why don't they have a plan for this? I mean, if health care were private, if insurance was truly private and competitive, wouldn't there be a long-term plan to deal with these kind of things? Wouldn't there be maybe a section of the hospital that was mothballed just for emergencies, just for pandemics? And maybe the first time there's a pandemic, there wouldn't be. But don't you think hospitals would learn that that's what they need? Now, it turns out that a lot of American hospitals... Well, so first, why does none of this exist? Well, none of this exists primarily because of government involvement in health care. I mean, government has squeezed hospitals. Private hospitals are squeezed by Medicare and Medicaid. They're squeezed by the fact that they have to. Have to, by law, treat anybody who shows up at the emergency room, whether they can pay or not. Hospitals cannot plan long-term. They cannot make significant capital investments in things that are speculative, in things that are long-term, like mothballing a building in case there's a pandemic. They can't do that because government payments have squeezed them so much. And there's no alignment of incentives between government and the hospitals. Government has no interest in thinking long-term. Government has no interest in planning long-term. Government wants to squeeze costs. Medicare and Medicaid are out of control. The budget is out of control. All the government wants to do. I mean, this idea that business is short-term and government is long-term is upside down. Government is short-term. At the House of Representatives, it's on a two-year cycle. At the Senate, it's on a six-year cycle. At the President's level, it's on a four-year cycle. Oh, really, a three-year cycle, because it's a four-year cycle, right? There is no long-term thinking in government. Not today. So even if a business wants to think long-term, if it's primary customer, which is the government, not you, the person coming into the hospital, but the government, is a short-term customer, doesn't care about the long-term, then it's almost impossible to make long-term investments. Now, imagine a world in which the government was not a customer. We got involved in healthcare with zero, where insurance companies insured pretty much everybody, young and old. And insurance companies are for-profit businesses that care about the long-term. And they are now, they're interested now, alone with the hospital. And insurance companies and hospitals would get together and draw out a plan. It would be in the insurance company is interesting to invest in such a plan, because the cost of the insurance company are gonna skyrocket during a pandemic. And the cost of the hospital are high. They would come up with the revenue potential for the hospital are high. They would come up with a plan to deal with pandemics, to plan in ahead, to plan in advance. But that cannot happen with government involvement in healthcare. All right, now, the other issue is, one second, let me just, the other issue is, do we know that there really is gonna be this overload? By the way, just put it aside once again. Equipment, testing, all of that is heavily regulated, controlled, I mean, do you have any doubt that if testing was all private that we'd have tons of tests? And the equipment respirators, all of that, all of that is regulated, controlled. Who can build them? Who can make them? Under what conditions they can be delivered? Do you know that the regulations tell a nurse in treating patient X what kind of mask she has to wear? Not her judgment, not the doctor's judgment, not the hospital's judgment, the bureaucrat's judgment. I know the people in FDA are not all people pushing bureaucrats, some of them are doctors and researchers, but they have a mentality of bureaucrats by definition, because they work for the hospital. What about, so all of that stuff, everything to do with setting up a hospital for an emergency like this involves regulations and controls that yes, create these limits, so if you wanted, so if you wanted to increase capacity in hospitals, what would you do? Well, you would loosen up licensing restrictions so you could bring in doctors and nurses from other states, from other countries, pay the money to bring them in, retired nurses and doctors, pay them enough money to bring them out of retirement. You would allow hospitals to set up field hospitals to take over abandoned buildings to improvise. You would get rid of all the different regulations about masks and about, let the doctors, let the hospitals who have a strong self-interest here, let them manage this, get the FDA out of it. Now, given the extent to which the government is involved today in healthcare, if the government is gonna do anything, then the government, and maybe in this case it should and it must because it's so involved in healthcare, the government should now pass a bill in Congress or to spend money on buying respirators, on buying tents for field hospitals, for ramping a production of anything that is needed, we've had two months. We could have ramped up production in a variety of different things. By the way, I read this amazing story today relating to ramping up production. So you know Louis Vuitton, you probably have walked by a Louis Vuitton store if you've been to a nice mall. I walk by Louis Vuitton stores all the time, never been in one, not interested, nothing there I wanna buy doesn't interest me, right? Louis Vuitton makes luxury goods, bags that cost $10,000, dresses that cost $20,000, makeup stuff, all kinds of things like that that are very, very high end. Well, Louis Vuitton has just announced that they are transitioning some of their production line from things like makeup and perfume to producing hand sanitizers. And they are going to basically do this for as long as necessary. And they're gonna provide it to the French health agency, I guess, I don't know if it's free of charge or at some minimal cost or whatever. So private enterprise is more than willing in a time of an emergency to ramp up production if called upon and if the red tape disappears and if you don't have the bureaucracy and the regulations and the controls, this shouldn't be a shortage of anything, anything. And it's not about supply chains from China. Purrell that makes all the disinfected stuff is an American company with American manufacturing. Indeed, supply chains are ramping up. So for example, China is kind of over this virus. They're ramping up production just as we as crushing production. So we'll be able to import a lot of supplies from China while we're shutting down everything in the United States. It's a beautiful thing. The global supply chain, international trade, globalization is amazing in terms of its ability to, I mean, imagine if the United States government or private hospitals or whatever put out bids globally, we need a thousand ventilators in a week who can produce them and deliver them and ship them from anywhere in the world. I mean, that's what you want. You want real competition. You want competition not just on price, but on speed of delivery. So no, there's so many solutions to these things that it, I'll tell you about my thinking later about the state of the world. And then objectively, are we in a situation in the United States where we're really gonna get it overloaded? No, I don't have an answer to that. But I read about things like the fact that the Cleveland Clinic has contingency plans because you know what, there were private clinic and private clinics think long-term and they make, God forbid, contingency plans. So they have contingency plans where they end elective procedures. They set up 150 additional hospital beds complete with IVs in a nearby hotel which they've identified or they could set up a field hospital which they've identified and they have the capacity and they have the ability to do it. They say that these contingency plans would give the Cleveland Clinic alone and extra thousand beds to accommodate coronavirus patients. Now that's a private enterprise. Thinking long-term, in spite of all the pressures placed on it by government. HSA Healthcare Inc, one of the nation's largest hospital systems, is asking staff across its roughly 180 hospitals to look for anywhere it might modify to put more patients from storage closets to shuttering buildings. You know, there are lots of things hospitals can do and hospitals will do and hospitals are doing. The first is obvious. Stop elective procedures. Delay non-urgent procedures. Free up as many hospital beds as you can. So the hysteria and the panic around hospitals I think is to a large extent unjustified because I think hospitals are gonna be creative, can be creative if given the freedom to do it. So infectious disease experts, for example, urge hospitals to separate patients with confirmed coronavirus or suspected coronavirus. So hospitals are doing this. The Nebraska Medicine, the hospitals and clinics affiliated with the University of Nebraska Medical Center have already set up such a ward, right? Even though I don't think they have any patients yet. And they plan to have another ward like that which would require hospital staff to relocate pediatric patients and empty space scheduled for renovation. You know, people are creative. They find solutions. But again, we minimize individual creativity. We minimize the human mind. We minimize human ability. We panic. We think everything is gonna, the sky is falling. Everything is a disaster. So there's so many things that could be done. Rational things. There's so many things the government could be doing given it's heavy role in the economy and in healthcare anyway. And what strikes me is so depressing and unfortunate is we're doing all the wrong things. All the wrong things. And we're panicking and we're in hysteria. And if you point out that these might be wrong, you're insensitive. You don't care about people. You're whatever. All right. I had a question here. Let me just see. Yeah, okay. So I'm gonna get the economic stuff. I know Jonathan Honing wants me to talk about the stock market. I will, let me just see. Okay, I wanted to talk about is this an emergency? I know I'm not sure if it's an emergency. I mean, again, I said this yesterday. You'd need a whole thinking process to figure out what is an emergency? What counts as an emergency? How you would deal with an emergency? What is the role of government in an emergency? What extra things should it be doing? Is 0.6 death rate an emergency? Is it an emergency? What is if it isn't? Is 0.4? So what constitutes an emergency is an important question that scientists, together with philosophers of law, should get together and figure out. Though all the government, as I said yesterday, is to protect individual rights, and that's it. And that means if somebody is infected, they should be quarantined. If, particularly, if they're gonna be exposed to people who might die. So again, is if they're only affiliate with other people who are young and healthy, does that constitute violation of individual rights? Probably not, but can you limit it that way? These are things that have to be thought through. I don't have the answer. These are things that would have to be thought through. I would say right now, given the government, what the government's doing, I'd rather they quarantine people who have been infected than the sweeping regulations that they have right now in the name of an emergency. And look, this is not a war. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence. And does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Using the super chat. And I noticed yesterday, when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrooksshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com, your own book show and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next.