Jiffy, ©Jarrett Scott Gladstone, 2019
The coronavirus pandemic tipped over the apple cart not just for our health care system and federal leadership, it knocked our traditional college education for a loop. The challenge for teaching my U.S. health policy and health leadership courses was that the crisis was directly related to my students learning. I saw that the assigned textbooks were suddenly outdated (see my article below about sensemaking) and I created a course that will help my students sort through and make sense of this health policy and government leadership mess.
However, I’m not perfect. I was working to keep up with the ever-changing news and fickle policy coming out of the White House. The best I could do was point out what I see as the most important things that students need to remember from this experience. These short lectures introduce students to philosophy, macroeconomics, hospital systems, leadership, and sensemaking.
Philosophy
Philosophy is important to know since philosophy influences how we see and interpret the world we experience. These interpretations are individual and personal. Our experiences come from what we see with our own senses, and from others’ experiences and passed onto us through informal and formal education, peer networks, news media, and even music. This list is very short and to understand more about the sources that influence your personal philosophy, I suggest you catch one of my ethics lectures (or check back into my home page to see if I got around to posting my ethics lectures).
Philosophy influences how we interpret what we see and experience in our world. Our interpretation influence our response to what we see and experience. And since everybody sees different things, see things differently, and has different experiences, we all have different interpretations about the world about us. And these interpretations influence what we find important and unimportant. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Worthwhile and worthless.
Thing is, when people get into positions of power, they can use their personal philosophies to control resources and create rules (policy) that affect other people. That can be good or bad, depending whether your personal philosophy meshes with the leader in power.
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is important because it’s about money. We need money to survive. Actually, it’s better to say it’s important that our normal lifestyles survive. Some of us are capable of living off the land should things really fall apart. Although it’s going to be tough since the Internet is now the base of Maslow’s (Updated) Hierarchy of Needs. When I composed my article about economics and the pandemic, I was thinking about Keynesian economics, which I admit I think is the best system around for keeping a large economy running, versus very narrow-sighted Hayekian thinking. NPR’s Planet Money says it best when they said that “[John Maynard] Keynes was, after all, an economist of crises.” The Covid pandemic has put our economy in crisis. When we are able to get back to work, we will need more than visits to the restaurants, bars, and barbershops to get things rolling again. Although I am very pro-universal basic income, we will need more than small cash distributions handed out to spend, we’ll need large capital investments by the U.S. government so that people who lost their jobs, because their employers no longer exist, will be able to find new work. Such large scale spending could be in building a strong public health infrastructure.
Keynesian economics is a form of capitalism. That is, it’s not about government ownership of businesses, which is a form of socialism. Keynesian economics advocates for government spending. The government has money, lots of it. And as we found out with the $2 trillion coronavirus relief act, the government can come up with the money, and yet despite it increasing the federal debt, other countries still have faith in our economy. Keynesian economics advocates for government spending to buy things from the private sector. When the government foots the bill, the private sector is eager to make things to sell to the government. If nobody as large as the government is going to buy things in quantities the government can afford, businesses have no incentive to make things on their own.
While I advocate Keynesian thinking and its role in capitalist activity, capitalism isn’t always the best solution for social needs such as pandemic response. This is where I strongly and adamantly argue for a single-payer health care system. There are many reasons why single payer is better, and at this moment, it’s better for responding to a major health crisis such as Covid 19. Rather than relying on a number of disconnected systems with different incentives for responding to pandemics, a single payer system might have coordinated resources much more quickly and efficiently. This, of course, is debatable depending on your economic philosophy. The most important lesson about economics is that we cannot and should not rely on the private to respond to health crises. Private industry wants to keep their supply and operating costs low. Creating far more N95 masks than consumers will buy simply creates inventory that needs to be stored. Storing extra inventory requires space. Space costs money. Therefore it is not profitable to make enough masks “just-in-case”. Governments don’t have to worry much about storage costs. The federal government has stuff squirreled away all over the place, such as military equipment and medical resources.
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While my economics lecture is critical about our health care system and laments the impact that the Covid pandemic has on it, I am grateful for a positive –albeit temporary– outcome of the crisis. Lockdowns have given the planet an opportunity to breathe, and cities are opening up boulevards for pedestrian only traffic.
Hospitals
The pandemic has really forced us to look at hospitals. Before explaining further, I add this philosophical (experiential) caveat: I was fortunately at home in lightly populated New Mexico when the pandemic hit Connecticut and New York City full-force, and my school’s shut down has kept me at home. While New Mexico health department asked me to self-isolate for 14 days since I very recently came from Connecticut and New York City, this is most I’ve had to deal with the pandemic. I personally am not experiencing a complete lock-down as my students and friends back East. My experiences about hospital demands are based on local stories, and demands in my part of New Mexico are nothing compared to experiences in New York and the nearby Navajo reservation. So, my commentary about hospitals is based only on news sources, and my academic knowledge as a business management professor.
Given my stronger knowledge about organization management, I look at the hospital response to Covid as a supply problem. I encourage my health administration and leadership students to think in a systems orientation. To consider the narrow line between having just enough resources to be profitable –or if you are working in a non-profit organization, to see high returns on investment (ROI)– yet not have too many resources that simply cost and waste money.
Leadership
My original plan was to create lessons about leadership and reference examples of effective and ineffective leadership that is demonstrated during this crisis. However I have been unable to keep up with the horrible examples. For now, I share a very good example of a leader whose only interest is his ego.
Sensemaking
Sensemaking is one of the processes we use to explain events that we experience. Sensemaking theory describes the processes that go on inside our heads when we are suddenly confronted with something new, unusual, and often harmful. Sensemaking is about how we react when the routine norms we experience in our daily lives are suddenly upset. Sensemaking is about when our safe routines are interrupted. Sensemaking is how we react to surprise. Most of all, sensemaking is important for us because it helps us react and act when we are confronted with danger.
Making Sense of Impromptu Online Teaching
Our educational system was upset. Students, teachers, and administrators were thrown for a loop when schools were forced to close in order to flatten the pandemic growth curve. As a university instructor, my original plans and routine expectation for my classes were interrupted. I had to make sense of what was going on in the health care crisis. Fortunately, as explained in sensemaking theory, I had education, knowledge, and background to draw upon to help me make sense about the changes to my teaching, although the changes did come slowly since my deep philosophical orientation conflicted with the rapid cascade of Covid-related news. My solution are these pages. My current students will find some very short assignments to complete. Simply to demonstrate that they read the pages. The pages will remain for a yet unknown length of time. This is deliberate since I hope that my students will come back to them from time-to-time to refresh their memory about the lessons.
This final link summarizes what many educators experienced, at least peers I’ve spoken with during this time: Welcome to Your Hastily Prepared Online College Course.
