Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Mental Health (video)

When you see John Oliver, you don't want an explanation, you want the link.

Here you go:

The GOP candidates take a deserved hammering for their reaction to the Oregon shooter but it's in the context of an overall review of health care in America.

Oliver does even-handed work as he congratulates the cops and I do it along with him for sending out specially-trained cops to deal with mental health situations.  The basis for that is a possible 50% of shootings of civilians is due to mental health matters.

Note 1: '50% of a shootings of civilians' adds up to a singular thing, it seems, and that's why 'it IS due to mental health matters' in the last sentence.  Even when you know English and know it well, it still doesn't make sense.

Note 2:  50% is a wild number and you will have to validate that for yourself.

Hang in with it until the punchline and he delivers it perfectly.


At the heart of this is something Lotho and I have been reviewing as to whether government or private practices are more efficient.  The video actually provides a case study in why it's almost impossible for government practices to be efficient despite doing eminently good work.  The case of Outreach is one example of that in which they unquestionably do good work ... but then the bureaucracy wraps around it.

My view of the systemic aspect is social support tries to absorb a large number of disparate services, all with different functions and management, and trying to continue them in their original form results in massive overhead.  This is a radical difference from the typical corporate approach which is to absorb, assimilate, bring it all out the same under one logo.  That's the standard model for bank predation and there's a lot of it.