The severe shortage of ventilators in the United States to cope with the anticipated wave of coronavirus patients who will require them illustrates what government can and cannot do—or at least should and should not do.
The government should plan and prepare for likely or predicted pandemics and other potential mass-scale medical emergencies by ensuring that hospitals and healthcare providers have the necessary supplies and equipment that they need to treat and care for patients.
I say likely or predicted pandemics because we obviously cannot anticipate every possible medical emergency. And it is not practical, feasible, or economical to prepare for everything that might happen, no matter how unlikely or remote.
But the truth is: the coronavirus is a pandemic that we were warned was coming, and which our elected representatives should have anticipated and prepared to combat. As NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reports:
For years, American intelligence agencies have been warning about the increasing risks of a global pandemic that could strain resources and damage the global economy, while observing that the frequency and diversity of global disease outbreaks has been rising.
In a worldwide threats assessment in 2018 and 2017, intelligence analysts even mentioned a close cousin of the current COVID-19 strain of coronavirus by name, saying it had “pandemic potential” if it were “to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
For this reason, writes Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post, a New York State task force found, in 2015, that the state had “16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic.”
Yet, state officials decided not to buy these 16,000 ventilators. The governor of New York at the time: Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
Ventilators. This is the same Andrew Cuomo who has been eloquent about his state’s need for 30,000 ventilators. Otherwise, he warns, hospitals in New York risk being overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.
And, if that happens (as it already has happened in Italy), hospitals and physicians will be forced to make heart-wrenching decisions about who gets a ventilator and who does not—meaning who gets to live and who does not.
Of course, it never should have come to this. State officials like Cuomo should have heeded the warnings of public health experts years ago and prepared for this foreseeable and predicted pandemic.
But we are where we are. What, then, is to be done?
Unfortunately, there are no quick and simple solutions. It takes time and money to manufacture ventilators, and, as Cuomo himself admits:
You can’t find available ventilators no matter how much you’re willing to pay right now, because there is literally a global run on ventilators.
For this reason, Cuomo and his left-wing allies in the media and in Congress want the federal government to provide the ventilators; and they fault Trump for allegedly not using the full powers of the presidency to make it happen.
They specifically fault Trump for supposedly failing to invoke the Defense Production Act to manufacture ventilators.
“I do not understand the reluctance to use the federal Defense Production Act to manufacture ventilators,” Cuomo tweeted. “If not now, when?”
But as the Wall Street Journal points out, Trump already has invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act
that lets a President, during a national emergency, order business to manufacture products for national defense, set wage and price controls, and allocate materials.
On Tuesday the Federal Emergency Management Agency used the Korean War-era law for the first time in this crisis to procure and distribute testing kits and face masks…
[But] businesses know their workforce capacities and supply chains better than the government—and how to retool them to maximize efficiency…
Ford said on Tuesday that it would start assembling plastic face shields and work with 3M and GE to make respirators and ventilators.
General Motors is also exploring how to use its global automotive supply chain to make ventilators.
Ford’s CEO said its ventilators could be available by June, and it isn’t obvious that a government takeover of manufacturing would speed this up,
In short, having the government order or mandate something doesn’t magically make it happen. If that were the case, the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War and we’d all be speaking Russian.
Private-sector companies and manufacturers, moreover, already are stepping up in a big way to provide ventilators, masks, gowns, nose swabs, and other critical health gear and equipment needed to combat the coronavirus. And the Trump administration is watching and prodding them as best it can.
Private Sector. Cuomo says that “only the federal government has the power to deliver” the ventilators. But this is nonsense and shows how little Cuomo knows. In truth, only the private sector has the power to deliver—and it will if the government lets it.
Indeed, contra Cuomo, what is needed is not nationalization of the medical supply chain, but rather deregulation of the medical supply chain. This so that private sector companies are free to innovate and rapidly produce the supplies and equipment that our healthcare professionals need.
And, on that score, there is some good news. Reason magazine’s Scott Shackford reports
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is easing up on some regulations so that ventilators can be manufactured and implemented more quickly to respond to the spread of COVID-19.
In new guidance issued on Monday, the FDA said that it will practice “enforcement discretion” by allowing manufacturers of ventilators to allow for some modifications of hardware, software, and materials.
This allows manufacturers more flexibility in response to supply shortages that could keep them from ramping up production.
The new guidance will also allow for the quicker addition of new production lines and alternative production locations.
[In other words], if other companies that have space to install production lines of their own (GM, for example, has offered unused space in its shuttered plants) those companies are free to do so.
In short, Cuomo has identified a real problem that he had it in his power to address years ago. However, he lacked the foresight and wisdom to do so. Thus he now urges the federal government to act. But he misdiagnoses the problem, and his recommend cure is no cure at all.
The best thing the government can do is to identify early on big issues and problems that need to be addressed, and then leave the private sector free to experiment and innovate its way toward a solution.
They know, far more than the state bureaucracy, what must be done to get us out of our logjam.
In the meantime, let us hope and pray that the entrepreneurs and the captains of industry can act quickly enough to ensure that, in the weeks and months to come, no American who needs a ventilator is denied a ventilator.
Feature photo credit: Associated Press via Salon.