REQUESTS » DR. A. “Mark, you said «We win or they die?» You and I ‘win’ in some way or everyone else dies?” “Yes” “I wish you would say a little more than that.” I am getting pretty frustrated by his terseness. It is not like him to be this terse. “Yes, either we work out a reasonable solution for the thirty five thousand homeless so they are safe, warm, dry, watered, and fed going into their future, or we don’t. If we don’t, then those homeless will die or live miserable lives. Lives you and most dialysis patients would not pick if given a choice. Lives people would not consider fair if society did not do its best to prevent… and those people ended up with that life because of a coin toss. So, if we don’t work out a solution for them, I will not work out a solution for the thirty five thousand dialysis patients that are now at risk due to a ‘resource shortage’.” “There is not a resource shortage related to dialysis. We have been building up infrastructure for decades. There are thousands of clinics and hundreds of thousands of workers, machines, and patients.” “And how many vampires?” “Tens of thousands. We discussed this months ago.” “And which of these ‘clinics’, ‘workers’, ‘patients’, ‘machines’, and ‘vampires’ is the limiting quantity?” “Vampires are clearly the most limiting, although it takes a while to train workers.” “So tens of thousands of vampires are doing dialysis for hundreds of thousands of patients. Say ten patients per vampire. What would happen if ten thousand vampires stopped showing up for dialysis” “They would cease to be.” “OK… they would cease to be. But what else would happen?” “A hundred thousand patients would need to be reallocated to other vampires and clinics.”
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