California - had it but squandered it

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Interesting article from the Los Angeles Times:

California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them
They were ready to roll whenever disaster struck California: three 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be deployed to the scene of a crisis on flatbed trucks and provide advanced medical care to the injured and sick within 72 hours.

Each hospital would be the size of a football field, with a surgery ward, intensive care unit and X-ray equipment. Medical response teams would also have access to a massive stockpile of emergency supplies: 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed.

And when was these halcyon days? Under the Governator:

In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.

“In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment,” he told a news conference. “I’m not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.”

And then, in 2011, Jerry Brown gets elected Governor and it all falls apart:

And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. The hospitals were defunded before they’d ever been used.

Much of the medical equipment — including the ventilators, critical life-saving tools that are in short supply in the current pandemic — was given to local hospitals and health agencies, former health officials said. But the equipment was donated without any funding to maintain them. The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced.

Together, these two programs would have positioned California to more rapidly respond as its COVID-19 cases exploded. The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8 million per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129 billion.

But they saved $5.8 million dollars - yeah which was 0.0044% of the total overall budget for the state. A pittance and now it is coming back to bite them. All the money wasted on solar scams, wasted on high-speed rail, on tax subsidies for green crap. All wasted. Sure felt good to spend it and it looked good to the low-information voter but it did not add anything to the quality of life or the benefit of the state or its citizenry.

Let us hope that this will foster a grand awakening for people to come to their senses. Liberal spending plans do not work and liberal governments have zero accountability for monies spent.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 28, 2020 2:28 PM.

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