It’s really just too depressing to write about the Dakotas, but this report made me laugh, and I want to explain why:
Sanford Health announced the resignation of [Sanford Health CEO Kelby] Krabbenhoft on Tuesday night. It marks the end of a run that started in 1996 when Krabbenhoft took over what was then Sioux Valley Hospital.
“We decided that today was a good time to retire,” Krabbenhoft said in a statement to the Argus Leader…
Krabbenhoft quit because he, the CEO of a huge health system, sent an anti-mask memo to all staff. The memo said that he had already had COVID, and therefore didn’t agree with the mask requirements for people like him who were now (according to him) immune for several months to years. He based this scientific opinion on his extensive experience as a scrub tech. Some more pearls of Krabbenhoft wisdom:
“The ‘on-again, off-again’ behavior of mask use by the general population violates every notion of serious infectious management that I was trained to adhere to, so some of this is absurd,” he wrote.
That memo enraged his staff to such a degree that his entire executive team had to sign a follow up that pointed out that his memo was his personal opinion and that Sanford will follow their mask policy.
Krabbenhoft become CEO of Sanford by buddying up with the richest man in South Dakota, Denny Sanford, a banker who made his money by issuing subprime credit cards (high interest rate, low-limit cards targeted at poor folks). Sanford gave $400 million to the Sioux Valley Hospital System, which renamed itself Sanford Health, and then began to buy or build hospitals all through the Plains states. A couple of months ago, news broke that Denny was under investigation for possession of child pornography. Denny has his golf shoes inscribed with the initials “WOLT” – “World’s Oldest Living Teenager”. Apparently the porn was on his cell phone.
The reason I laughed on reading this story was that Krabbenhoft, an old, white, highly compensated male, could have kept his fucking opinions to himself and retired with a modicum of dignity and respect. Now he’s a god damned disgrace. That’s a tiny bit of justice in a state where a lot of innocent people are dying.
trollhattan
Funny, how wrongheaded attitudes of people in high places lead to other people dying. But everyone has to die sometime amirite?
Patricia Kayden
Delusional
trollhattan
@Patricia Kayden:
Like bank robbers are “building a nestegg”?
dr. bloor
For the life of me, I’ll never figure out how dumb fucks like Sanford actually survive a winter in South Dakota.
mrmoshpotato
@Patricia Kayden: Haha, what a moron (both).
NYCMT
My cousin Harry (born Hans Joachim in a little town in the Vogelsbergs that went judenrein when he was three) taught economics for 40 years at South Dakota State University. His widow Lillian, daughter of refugees in Sao Paulo, has stayed in Brookings instead of joining her sons in either Minneapolis or Columbus, and it is with a renewed and rising sense of panic that I’m watching South Dakota recapitulate New York in April.
RSA
This strikes a chord with me. I sometimes interact with Trump supporters on a different social media platform, typically friends of (more tolerant) friends. If the discussion gets heated I’ll sometimes observe that “We’re all laypersons here; we should defer to the consensus of experts.”
Surprisingly, this sets some people off. Most recently it was in a debate over the efficacy of wearing masks, and one guy responded that he worked in the medical field. The rest of us were laypersons, but he was certainly not. I checked out his profile to discover he worked for a company that supplies and maintains medical equipment to hospitals. (If I were unkind I would liken him to a Xerox repair guy. A fine job, but not one that qualifies you to judge information content that passes through the machines.) It’s amazing what people will latch onto as justification for their deeply held but irrational judgments.
mrmoshpotato
These idiots and assholes. It’s just a mask! Wear it over your mouth and nose while out, and wash your bony hot dogs (and the rest of your hands) when you get back home!
Spanky
@Patricia Kayden: There’s no guarantee that he meant the US of A.
NotMax
Comedy gold, Jerry.
:)
mrmoshpotato
Name test.
Hmmm….nym/email remembered in Firefox but not in Duckduckgo.
Android 9 smartphone
Nora Lenderbee
I Got My Immunity, F— You
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky: Rudes is saving Mother Russia? Interesting.
mrmoshpotato
@Nora Lenderbee: So – how long until this jackass gets reinfected?
The Moar You Know
@dr. bloor: Central and automotive heating, neither of which was invented by a CEO. So far as I can tell, the only things any CEO has ever invented are better tax dodges, excuses for paying employees less, and novel methods of ripping off the public at large. Both of which I consider more “crimes” than “contributions”. Elon Musk may be the sole exception, but he still does the other three as well.
If you need to venerate someone and throw lots of cash at them, you could do worse than to throw it at people who actually build stuff that makes our lives better.
Starfish
Why do the people of South Dakota love the dumbest leaders? Who are these people who are proud of Norm, and why?
MomSense
@mrmoshpotato:
I still laugh about Driftglass calling it Bronze Age equipment.
Mary G
Only the best people.
jayjaybear
@Nora Lenderbee: The eternal Republican refrain.
Poe Larity
He could have just gotten a scarlet mask with the letter A for Ass.
Now it does make me think what happens after the vaccine is out. Can I go out maskless with a “I Vaccinated” sticker?
Brachiator
The reason I laughed on reading this story was that Krabbenhoft, an old, white, highly compensated male, could have kept his fucking opinions to himself and retired with a modicum of dignity and respect.
It’s kinda hard to have a modicum of dignity and respect when your name is “Kelby Krabbenhoft.” That’s like, the name of a Batman villain.
As for his buddy, Sanford and the charges against him…
Has there been any follow-up to this? Even for a guy like this, saying that he has been investigated for something does not indicate guilt of anything.
On the other hand,
This is creepy.
Chyron HR
JustRuss
@The Moar You Know: Musk hasn’t invented anything AFAIK. He holds a few software patents, but those are often pretty dodgy. (Not sure in his case). Henry Ford was a bastard, but he did actually invent things. He was very hands-on when FoMoCo started.
patrick II
@Patricia Kayden:
From democracy.
SiubhanDuinne
Per ancestry.com:
That works for me.
mrmoshpotato
@MomSense: Haha, forgot about that!
mrmoshpotato
@Brachiator: WTF?
Pro tip: Don’t cook bacon shirtless no matter how hot it is in July. My brother learned that the painful way.
tokyokie
@Starfish:
I still wonder, decades later, how the state ever elected George McGovern to the Senate.
Tazj
I feel like many people where I live now (in Hamburg NY in a suburb of Buffalo) long for the “freedom” of South Dakota. There’s a gym owner on the local news every night who has kept his gym open when it’s supposed to be closed. He refused to close so now he’s been fined $15,000 by the Health Department. It seems like they’re trying to make him some kind of folk hero and it’s driving me crazy.
Meanwhile, Cuomo is some kind of monster and tyrant because of local restrictions and closures. I don’t love Cuomo and he’s made his share of mistakes, and I don’t like the way he treats reporters sometimes but the way the local news portrays him is ridiculous. They blew up the statement he made that people in the Buffalo let their guard down because it wasn’t as bad here as it was in NYC. This is absolutely true. He didn’t deny there was loss here but it wasn’t as bad, nothing insulting or wrong about the statement, just the truth. I know that there were people in my area having big parties before and during Halloween(from my teenager). They didn’t take precautions or take things seriously.
And now things are much worse here, much worse than they were in the spring. My husband works at an area hospital and they’re getting slammed, my sister works at an assisted care facility that didn’t have COVID in the spring and now they do.My niece works at a nursing home and patients that they would transfer to another facility if they were positive are just moved to another floor, but Cuomo is the big problem.
SiubhanDuinne
@mrmoshpotato:
My mother once stapled her nipple to a screen door. Can your brother top that?
scav
I’m beginning to think they can’t recognize they’re free unless they see someone else suffering, someone else with less. Their world is that zero-sum. Their marriages are made meaningless if same-sex marriages are licit and demonstrably working as well as any others. Their holiday is warred upon if other holidays are acknowledged.
Barbara
This was big news in my little world. The prospect of half your staff walking out in rage probably galvanized the executive team. Sanford has recently been acquired by Intermountain Healthcare so I would imagine that its leadership also wasn’t amused.
Bill Arnold
@Poe Larity:
It’s going to be a big mess. There will be people insisting that they don’t need to follow masking regs because they’re vaccinated (with no or dubious evidence), there will a market for fake proof of vaccination documents, etc. The faster the vaccine rollout is, the better. Need to get R0 below 1 nationally and then wait a month or two.
Uncle Cosmo
@mrmoshpotato: SF writer Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) once opined that the best way to fry bacon was buck nekkid – after the first time you let the heat get too high, you’ll never make that mistake again.
Kattails
@SiubhanDuinne: ummmmm– how? I mean, imagination fails me.
Roger Moore
@dr. bloor:
Money provides a surprisingly effective insulator against many things, including cold and reality.
Roger Moore
@Poe Larity:
Even people who were vaccinated would be wise to continue wearing masks for a fair while. The vaccines are not 100% effective, and it would really suck to get sick because you were one of the unlucky 10-30% and thought you were safe.
Expatchad
@SiubhanDuinne: The intertubes are now yours entirely and eternally!
Expatchad
The intertubes are entirely and eternally yours!
Just One More Canuck
@Kattails: agreed – I need more details
Roger Moore
@Uncle Cosmo:
The trick to cooking bacon without spattering is to get dry cured bacon instead of wet cured. It’s more expensive, but that’s mostly because there’s more meat and less water. I get traditionally dry cured bacon, and it’s amazing. The only problem is it’s so strongly flavored it works better as an ingredient than for eating by itself. I like to say it has twice the salt and five times the smoke of grocery store bacon.
Super Dave
@RSA: A little like the folks who service the lavatories on airliners… they’re in aviation!
catpal
@Tazj: I am also in WNY near you – and angry and frustrated that some people have not been wearing masks and don’t care that they are making things worse for all here.
Once again some local media think the gym owner ant-mask protest must be reported many times more than the stress of healthcare workers and those getting sick.
David ?Booooooo!? Koch
@tokyokie: He won by a hand full of votes (597) one week after Kennedy “won” the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That’s also how Birch Bayh pulled off a huge upset win in Indiana, riding Kennedy’s coattail:
RaflW
A couple days ago, for whatever tiny bit it was worth, I tweeted a photo with names of every one of the volunteer board members of Sanford Health. I suggested that if they didn’t get that moron to shut up, they might be at some personal risk. I’m sure the ‘nonprofit’ has excellent D&O insurance for the C-suite and the Board, but these people signed up to at the least burnish their reputations, and maybe some of them to actually have some positive impact on the community.
That idiot was not having a positive impact, except on the positivity rate!
Oklahomo
@SiubhanDuinne: A man working in a mobile home factory when my mother worked there stapled a piece of wood to his dick (he was leaning against a thin slat while stapling something to it). They had to cut the piece of wood off to take him to the emergency room since yanking it out might have caused uncontrollable bleeding. He fully recovered, but found work else where.
bluefoot
@scav: I’m convinced that that was part of the motivation to reopen and for the protests in favor of reopening. They can’t be superior if they can’t see people putting themselves at risk for their convenience/vanity/laziness. Especially if the people serving them food, coloring their hair, cleaning their gym, etc aren’t white men. They validate their existence by making other people suffer for them. It’s disgusting. Like Mitch McConnell laughing when asked snout the people who will suffer without another COVID relief package. It’s all of a piece.
catclub
I think there will be ID cards showing you were vaccinated. For admission to crowded events.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@RSA: “worked for” is the main point. If he worked successfully in the medical equipment industry as a repair tech he would understand complying with regulations since life critical electronic devices are the most restricted category in the electronics hardware industry.
Want to bet that attitude of your friend is what got him laid off?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Brachiator: Considering the way the Right has been tossing around accusations of pedophilia lately with stuff like Pizzagate it’s quite possible there is a repeat of the ’80s Satanic Child Abuse panic going on off in MAGA Land and it this the Dakotas. It’s not impossible Sanford is being accused of kidy porn to blackmail him into having his hospitals back the anti masking.
NotoriousJRT
“an old, white, highly compensated male, could have kept his fucking opinions to himself…”
My thought: Have you spent time around old, white highly compensated males? Any keep their fucking opinions to themselves?