California once had mobile hospitals, ventilator stockpile but dismantled them

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-once-had-mobile-hospitals-and-a-ventilator-stockpile-but-it-dismantled-them/ar-BB11O8Gs

by masonic • 6 years ago

173 83 6 years ago

msn.com

twblalock4• 6 years ago

There is going to be a lot of second-guessing after this is all over.

I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? How many voters would have chosen to keep this program or discontinue it?

We are about to enter another deep recession and similar cuts will be made, which may seem unwise to people a decade from now.

jiqiren2• 6 years ago

Only needed $5.8million/year in an overall budget of $129billion. It also resulted in an ultimate loss of an already spent $200million initial investment.

triangleman• 6 years ago

Not only that but per the article:

"In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds."

Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.

masonic5• 6 years ago

In contrast, CA budgets $98 million/year just for full MediCal plans for undocumented people age 0-26.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

How many people were thinking about pandemics then?

Hopefully quite a few, considering the H1N1 pandemic was just two years earlier.

The article mentions this was also for earthquake preparedness, which any California government should be thinking of.

TheOperator• 6 years ago

I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this.

Guess we should just give up on any emergency preparedness if a recession makes cutting these programs blameless.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

I remember those budget cuts. As far as I could tell, the state engaged in efforts to make the most damaging cuts possible in every department while leaving pet construction projects and similar things alone (cutting state parks really hard for example).

I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.

selimthegrim2• 6 years ago

I was at UCSB at the time and I remember incensed undergrads camping out in the public spaces for weeks.

ip26• 6 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

parineum• 6 years ago

I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then?

The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program.

It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.

twblalock4• 6 years ago

It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.

A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.

It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.

wbl• 6 years ago

Prop 13 strikes again. Due to it CA has wild revenue shifts.

WalterBright2• 6 years ago

The idea is to bank the surplus during the fat years. But no politician was ever re-elected for having a budget surplus.

briandear2• 6 years ago

That’s what leadership is: being able to make hard choices and selling that to the voters. I haven’t met anyone opposed to disaster preparedness funding, but I have met plenty of people opposed to the bottomless pit spending for various causes du jour.

twblalock4• 6 years ago

How do you convince people in 2011 that preparing for a pandemic is not a "cause du jour"?

Nobody would have bought that a month ago. In 2011 you would have been laughed out of the room.

xtracto• 6 years ago

Your federal government should use 10% of their yearly defense budget (700 billion) for epidemic/health preparedness. In a way it is part of national defense ...

bsder3• 6 years ago

It was a sop to stupid California Republicans. The jungle primaries got rid of those starting in 2012.

California should have reestablished this later, though. Unfortunately, everybody forgets once the crisis is gone.

someguydave• 6 years ago

Are you trying to make the case for single party rule here?

tathougies2• 6 years ago

Ah right, the fact that a democrat governor got rid of pandemic preparations made by a Republican one is the fault of republicans

TaylorAlexander3• 6 years ago

Serious question: is $26B a big deficit for California?

Gibbon12• 6 years ago

It's not the end of the world. California currently almost 40 million people. So $650 per capita.

jfnixon2• 6 years ago

It is just a bad choice to cut emergency preparedness. This is California, how many mass transit boondoggles survived the 2011 budget cuts?

GeekyBear• 6 years ago

I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this.

Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.

jiqiren2• 6 years ago

I kind of wish Arnold was more vocal about the stupidity of them dismantling what he built. Was only $5.8million/year to maintain the $200million+ initial investment. What a huge waste.

Apocryphon• 6 years ago

Makes you wonder what earthquake emergency infrastructure has been shut down during cost cutting.

briandear2• 6 years ago

Santa Clara County is hell bent on closing Reid Hillview airport — how quickly they forget that in times of serious disaster, those airports are lifelines. Watsonville was cutoff during the 1989 earthquake and it was the relief flights from GA pilots that kept that town alive during that time. Disaster preparedness is a fundamental role of the state, especially a state like California where you have the potential for huge catastrophes mixed with difficult geography and lots of people.

omgwtfbyobbq• 6 years ago

I imagine it could have been less than $6 million/year if the state was willing and able to recertify the equipment in the same way the DoD does with medications.

https://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44979

I think state and federal government should work together to create and fund independent state/federal agencies to handle the storage, handling, and certification of stockpiled goods. It'd probably pay for itself fairly quickly.

Edit - That could be a problem for many politicians. I imagine a lot of pork comes from replacing expensive equipment and supplies.

kichik• 6 years ago

Without paywall: http://web.archive.org/web/20200328132638/https://www.latime...

roenxi2• 6 years ago

I might be projecting; but there is probably a fair amount of overlap between people who are in favour of enacting good emergency preparedness are the same sort of people who like balanced budgets (whether by raising revenue or decreasing costs). Those sort of people seem to struggle in US politics and the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.

It isn't surprising that the government would be caught flat-footed by anything that wasn't needing a regular response. Long-term thinkers only get voted in by accident; the public prefers charisma.

wonnage• 6 years ago

I think you're projecting, this was cut in the name of balancing the budget by decreasing costs (albeit to help meet a massive budget deficit) if you read the article.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

I'm working off the rumors [0] that California has a massive long term problem which is generally being ignored by successive governments. I don't see how they can sustain an emergency preparedness program if they have that sort of business-as-usual preparedness problem. Step 1 to me is always be prepared for the most-likely future case, then step 2 is prepare for progressively less likely scenarios.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.
the public prefers charisma.

Democracy is not really tuned to long term thinking. It's tuned to "the next election cycle", and in places like California elections are happening all the time.

faitswulff• 6 years ago

I think Democracy in the USA would have a better shot if it weren't for the two-party system.

PaywallBuster• 6 years ago

I would say that

1. Current system allows running over budget too easily

2. Many costs are difficult to cut (like unionized state employees)

3. Alternatively, the low hanging fruit is cut very fast when budget requires balancing.

fra• 6 years ago

Edit: I see the msn link was chosen because of no paywall. I wonder if there is a way we can give a h/t to the LATimes as well for the fantastic reporting though.

It would be nice to point at the source, rather than a repost on msn.com: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...

masonic5• 6 years ago

LAT is clearly credited in this version, but this avoids the native paywall.

raspasov• 6 years ago

Current worst case projections for New York State are for around 30,000 ventilators needed at the peak of the epidemic. 2400 is not insignificant but hardly enough in this case. Nobody predicted or projected the scale of the current crisis in terms of ventilators needed. Germany is best prepared of all countries, has around 30,000. Hopefully we flatten the curve enough so those worst case projections never materialize.

lsiebert• 6 years ago

Thing about disaster preparedness that needs to be mentioned over and over. When you do it right, everything looks very easy, like it wasn't a big problem. A good plan may look like you didn't do very much at all, whereas efforts when stuff goes bad because of bad plans can look like a lot of amazing impressive stuff getting done heroically.

pentae• 6 years ago

I'm still of the opinion that pandemic preparedness should be treated like a threat to the nation and part of the military budget. It should not be up to the states to prepare, it should be federal and treated as any other military threat of an unknown enemy. It's crazy to think that we spend so much on tanks and fighter jets and military but can't find some loose change for viral pathogens. What about when the enemy deploys a virus against us?

pauljurczak• 6 years ago

"The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced"

WTF? How difficult is it to keep the reserve as FIFO buffer in respirator supply chain? You probably don't even have to take them out of standard shipping container.

Groxx• 6 years ago

When your FIFO is suddenly flooded with a massive time-limited over-supply: a lot gets lost, and re-creating that over-supply really isn't part of your normal operations.

joncrane• 6 years ago

Does anybody else find it ironic that a Republican governor (Arnold) commissioned the $200m mobile hospitals and that a Democrat (Jerry Brown, subject of one of the best Punk songs ever) dismantled the project?

RickJWagner• 6 years ago

A good question, but not really.

It depends on the economics and politics of the day. Richard Nixon (R) was a gun control advocate. Most Democrats were on the wrong side of Civil Rights.

Different day, different context.

California once had mobile hospitals, ventilator stockpile but dismantled them

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