I totally agree with you, it is important for people to understand that a medical doctor does not really care if you can walk a mile without pain, but it is way too nuanced to track quality of life changes across a large population. We would need to change the insurance landscape and make it easier for other medical practitioners to get insurance money and let it naturally change.

If even a little bit of the insurance money could start funneling into things like physical therapy (actual physical therapy not the BS artists at big hospitals who print you out a sheet of generic exercises) people could see practitioners who actually care about you being functional.

I tore my achilles and saw a string of doctors, podiatrists, physical therapists, chiropractors, etc. before finally finding someone that doesn't take insurance but who had me running again within a few months. He was cheap compared to the amount my insurance was being billed for a chiropractor to try and sell me $500 custom insoles. The money is there it is just being funneled in all the wrong ways.

Clean room equipment is kind of the opposite of what was needed. Clean room equipment protects the room from the people.

What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.

Even the kind of masks we all got used to during COVID (KN95 etc) would have probably done wonders compared to the nothing they were given.

but importantly, the down-the-line costs can be obfuscated and spread across the private and public sectors just enough that the government can claim deniability and therefore is no longer on the hook for the costs.

Doesn't matter. Literally the same calculus as reopening everything far prematurely for COVID: "But the economy!"

The people running this show don't give a flying fuck about the working class. They'll march us into the meat grinder no matter what.

Republicans, to their discredit, have not.

And the fear was visible and public. We watched planes hit our tallest buildings live on TV and the horrors that ensued. It was publicly visceral in a way that an invisible virus, which has had people struggling in relative privacy and obscurity, hasn't been.

I bet that happened for no reason at all, just like how the US went into Afghanistan for no reason in 2001.

(Sarcasm aside, there obviously are big problems for how these 2 nations responded to the massive terrorist attacks. But I kind of think it’s questionable to pretend there was no big terrorist attack that triggered the response...)