Actually I think that articles very opening premis is exactly as obviously false as they say the original articles premis is.

In other words for example they have not shown that the purpose of a cancer hospital is not in fact to cure 2/3 of cancers. They say it's obviously absurd but that's just a bald assertion with no backing meat.

It can absolutely be argued that the hospital is doing exactly what it's intended to do, because it's what everyone involved is satisfied with letting it do.

Yes obviously it doesn't sound like an obvious way to interpret the functioning of the hospital. No one needs to write an article to explain that the world works the way it appears to or claims to. The whole point of the original POSIWID is to show that some other less obvious, possibly even intentionally hidden interpretation of a system is at least valid and logically "not inconsistent" with the facts and observations.

If the operators and funders of a hospital would like to cure all cancers but physically can't, one way to say that is that the hospital is simply doing the next best thing. Everyone involved has settled for some compromise and balance of resources devoted to it such that the amount of cost is as high as they are willing to go for the amount of cancers they are curing. However many they are curing, and even if 100% is not possible, there is still always some amount better they could do for some amount more investment, until all possible resources are devoted to that and nothing else. Everyone stops somewhere short of that and lives with the 2/3 performance instead of the 3/4 performance. And so the system is doing what everyone involved has decided it shall do. The purpose of the system is what it does.

That's not an absurd argument at all, and this rebuttal does not invalidate it.

Having lived in the U.S. for a while, it's apparent the purpose of a hospital is "provide big salaries to top administrators and executives whilst providing enough health care that they can get away with it".

We all seem to love to be one-dimensional: simplifying down a story from a spectrum to a trite summary.

POSIWID is about finding a single "purpose" and defining that as the apex reason for a system (usually to manipulate).

I'm not sure how we have more balanced discussions.

  reductionism: squashing a many-layered phenomenon into a single tidy cause
  framing: choosing one angle of a story and strawmanning or deflecting.
  false dichotomy: where every shade of gray is lost.
  single-axis narratives: narrative manipulation where you steer the public to think along just one line (whatever works — economic, moral, tribal).

fact