McCormick Place hospital’s cost to taxpayers? $1.7 million per patient. How the deal happened.(chicago)

SunTimes ^ | 8-14-20 | Tim Novak and Robert Herguth

[dynachrome]

Taxpayers spent nearly $66 million fashioning McCormick Place into an emergency coronavirus hospital with 2,750 beds this past spring amid fears that COVID-19 patients would overwhelm hospitals in the Chicago area.

Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Just 38 patients were transferred to the sprawling convention center — meaning taxpayers’ cost for the makeshift hospital turned out to be more than $1.7 million per patient, on average.

But top aides to Mayor Lori Lightfoot say her decision to initiate the project with the federal government and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority was an important “insurance policy” at a time of “immense emergency.”

“It’s something I’m incredibly proud of,” says Samir Mayekar, Lightfoot’s deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development who says the money was “not spent in vain.”

He also notes that the medical equipment is being stored and can be redeployed if

[dynachrome]

As corrupt as chicongo is, most of the money was stolen.

[markoman]

“insurance policy”

Insurance for the unions.

Marko

[bigbob]

Call it a training exercise for ACE.

[Wuli]

World wide, the Left and the globalists ALWAYS tout the dollars committed for some “solution”, from “economic development” projects, to “infrastructure”, to many other things, like the emergency hospitals in Chicago and New York. Even many of their looking back reports will just tout those dollars. What they themselves don’t do is give good accounting of the value returned for the dollars spent. To them it is always about their motives, not the results. To them when you question the results, they angrily react because they see it as an attack on their motives, and they will then claim at least they have the right motives and you do not.

[hal ogen]

Typical DIM/Leftist/LIB corruption. Pathetic yet typical.

[JennysCool]

Of course, it’s not just Chicago that’s corrupt. Remember, we were supposed to do the stay-at-home everywhere for, oh, just a few weeks to “flatten the curve” and prevent hospitals from being overrun with patients.

Having found that most everyone bought that and it worked pretty well, the Democrat Governors got out their laundry-list of all the control-freak tyrannies they’d been lusting after for years, and took it from there.

When the first part of an equation (in this place the feared mad run on hospitals) is incorrect, the rest of the equation usually is, too.

[Dark Knight]

A real story would have the amount allocated for treatment and the amount allotted for the program. Just like all government stories, they can phony up the numbers, but it is a start.

DK