The people who are paid to plan for this stuff planned accordingly. It wasn’t the planners that sucked. It was all of the bureaucratic fools who would look at their budget requests and slash them. It was the hospital administrators who dug into their PPE stocks during the flu season, thinking they could get it replaced “next quarter.” Oops.
Do we blame the people responsible for preparing when their bosses dismissed them as “dramatic?”
Early on in this I had drinks with some former colleagues in the Emergency Prep field. It was bittersweet—lots of smirking at the managers and administrators who rejected our recommendations, but also a frustration as we saw people in the middle of the mess getting sick and seeing the nursing homes get ravaged.
In America it pretty much boils down to the bottom line. No one wants to spend money on “events” that have less than a 1% chance of happening. Who is to blame for that.
[In America it pretty much boils down to the bottom line. No one wants to spend money on “events” that have less than a 1% chance of happening. Who is to blame for that.]
Without the need to admit ER patients who don’t have evidence of ability to pay, you gotta wonder how many hospital financial problems would go away. Seems to me that hospital closures in the face of the addition of tens of millions of people is counter-intuitive, and explicable primarily by the financial pressures imposed by that Reagan-era law. I gotta wonder if it’s one reason so many ER departments are shutting down - one less source of financial strain - just divert potential deadbeats in need of critical care to other hospitals.