Posted by gomiami1972 on 3/23/2020 7:18:00 PM (view original):
Posted by dino27 on 3/23/2020 6:19:00 PM (view original):
also my head...we are missing some generic things right now...gloves...masks...gowns.....beds...ventilators which dont go bad and we can always use.
Your head is right if you assume infinite resources.
I'll concede the debate and we'll agree to disagree.
This.
It's easy to say "oh, we're the richest country in the world, we should have more beds, we should have more ventilators." The only way we have significant excess above average annual need is to have the costs subsidized by the government in some way, whether as grants to private hospitals or as part of a national health system. So the Federal government, presumably, is paying for that. The last time we've had a major epidemic in this country was the last pandemic. That was 101 years before this one. If we had our government pay for beds for all that time, waiting for this, how many fewer starving children could we have fed, housed, and educated? How many more people would have died in the interim?
In the real world, where resources are limited, having an excess of healthcare equipment is not the long-term distribution of resources that saves the most lives. It's easy to overreact to the moment. And to be clear - in the moment, it's appropriate to pay for equipment that we don't anticipate being in excess in the coming months. But don't pretend stockpiling such apparatus in the long term is an efficient way to protect American lives. It absolutely is not. We're a rich country, but not that rich.