Saturday, December 6, 2008

Damned if you do

And damned if you don't. A while back, CVS drug stores started a new "MinuteClinic" program where stores had clinics with a Nurse Practitioner on duty. The idea is that a lot of ailments could be addressed much less expensively than a doctor visit or (even worse) the Emergency Room.

CVS tried to roll this out throughout New England. They're rolling it out most places, but not the city of Boston.

Gosh, why not? You'd think that this would be ideal for the city, especially the poor neighborhoods.

Well it seems that hizzoner Mayor Menino doesn't like the idea, so Boston blocked CVS.

OK, so the leftie mayor of Boston is an idiot. So what's new? Well, it seems that the usual leftie suspects are complaining that CVS isn't opening MinuteClinic stores in the city, and that this is discriminating in favor of the suburbs. Matter of fact, they don't like how CVS runs its stores:
Russ Davis, executive director of Jobs with Justice, believes the report's findings. He said monitoring inventory in high-crime neighborhoods more tightly and operating more stores in neighborhoods where people spend more may make "sense from a business point of view, but it doesn't make sense from a moral point of view."


Actually, it does, from a moral perspective. My biggest beef with the left is that they think that a market economy is immoral, when in fact the converse is true. Somehow it's more moral to have an unaccountable bureaucrat making decisions that effect your life and health?

At least with a store, you can boycot or sue them. Can't do that with the bureaucrats. So why does the government get a pass?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Morons all of them. We shop at CVS a lot, and drive an extra 10 miles to go to the one that is not in the hood.

TOTWTYTR said...

This is a clear case of the Mayor using his powers to stifle competition. The city runs several health centers that offer much the same service as what CVS is proposing. If people can go to a more efficient clinic than the city runs (and I don't see how they can't be), then why would they go to the city run clinics?

Well, you know the answer to that, they won't. It is anathema to the Mayor that the private sector provide a service more efficiently than the city can.

As the wingnuts from "Jobs with Justice" understand that they are interested in neither jobs for the disadvantaged nor justice for them. Like all advocacy groups, they are interested in extorting money from commercial enterprises and perpetuating their phony baloney jobs.

CVS has a legal, moral, and fiduciary obligation to try to reduce theft from all of their stores. In the areas where this is more likely to happen, they have to be more vigilant than in the areas with lower crime. If the people who live in those higher crime areas don't like that they should concentrate on taking steps to lower crime and thus risk for CVS.

Nahh, that will never happen.