COVID-19: A Case Study of Government Failure

Recommendable!

"... reject efforts to adopt Medicare for All in response to COVID-19 and instead eliminate the tax subsidies that encourage people to obtain health insurance through their employers and let people purchase health insurance that covers only catastrophes. ... The SNS [Strategic National Stockpile] proved its value in responding to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the H1N1 epidemic in 2009. Unfortunately, the H1N1 epidemic depleted the SNS’s inventory of masks and other equipment, and neither President Obama nor President Trump expended the political capital needed to obtain sufficient funds to replenish it. ... In 2010, HHS sought to close the gap [severe shortage of ventilators] by hiring Newport Medical Instruments to build a fleet of inexpensive portable devices. No ventilators were ever delivered. Before production started, Newport Medical Instruments was purchased by Covidien, a large device maker, which backed out of the contract in 2014. It took HHS five years to finalize a new contract—too late to have the ventilators ready for COVID-19. ... Several governmental reports also noted that the SNS had far too few N95 masks. In 2015, the government projected that between 1 billion and 7 billion masks would be required in the event of a flu‐​like pandemic, depending on the severity of the outbreak. When COVID-19 reached America’s shores, the SNS had only 10 million N95 masks. The SNS was also short of swabs, transport media, and the reagents that were necessary for COVID-19 testing to proceed. ..."



COVID-19: A Case Study of Government Failure | Cato Institute The federal government was not ready for COVID-19, even though it has dealt with epidemics and pandemics for more than a century.