A global pandemic has ground much of this nation to a halt. It is human nature to want to find someone to blame. Without a doubt Trump bears a great deal of blame for the extreme level of our inability to respond to this crisis adequately. That said, we are facing massive problems that would put us behind the eight ball no matter who the President was. It does not matter how good they were in responding to this from the beginning, our systems across the board would still have failed us.
Trade and manufacturing policy
We can’t produce enough cotton swabs on the end of a stick. While President Trump absolutely should have fully enacted the DPA to centralize production and distribution of needed supplies and materials, it remains, even had he done so, manufacturers in this country do not have the capacity or the supply chains any longer to transition to the production of cotton swabs on the end of a stick.
That is a result of decades of gutting our manufacturing sector through a trade policy which hollowed out much of our middle class these last 30 years. The impact of that goes well beyond the economic harm done to a huge segment of the working population but has rendered us incapable of responding to this crisis in the timely ramp-up of production this situation requires.
Our failing healthcare system
While the Democratic Party seems dead set on maintaining a for-profit healthcare system, it is failing right in front of our eyes. PPE shortages are a tiny example of why. Hospitals, like most large business, is largely run by financial engineers. The consequences of that are myriad. Here are a few:
Just in time inventory — Storage rooms cost money. To the mind of a financial engineer they are a waste of money. That’s why so many hospital systems ran out of PPE in the first week of facing this crisis. We have seen the pictures of nurses in garbage bags. We have seen the pictures of janitorial staff cleaning rooms with even less protection than that. It is shameful in this country that we are so willing to risk the lives of our caregivers, all so someone can make money off of our HEALTH.
It also explains the massive shortage of hospital beds we are seeing across the country. Also, a for-profit system sees zero value in providing healthcare to massive swaths of rural America so many people can’t get the care they need in a non-pandemic world. Now it's only worse. I mean, we have non-governmental global humanitarian organizations that formed to support healthcare in underserved areas around the globe, that discovered the regions of greatest needs are right here in the United States. The richest nation in the history of the world.
It is a failing system that must be replaced.
None of that factors in lack of healthcare coverage even
Now, with probably 22 million people losing their jobs in the last month, a great many of them now lost their healthcare coverage. I know they get a special enrollment period in Obamacare. Many of them were living paycheck to paycheck, they have no income, they can’t even get through to unemployment offices to file for benefits and no Obamacare plan starts coverage until they get that first premium payment. Even then, most of them have copays and deductibles that renders even going to the doctor unaffordable, even if you are paying that premium. Particularly when you have zero income and need to house and feed a family.
I mean the entire notion that losing your job due to the massive public health crisis this pandemic presents also means you lose your access to healthcare is just fucking obscene. Lowering the Medicare age to 60 ain’t gonna fix that. Expanding the options of insurance to pay for with high copays and deductibles is unworkable. I just imagine that family where one spouse works, the other stays home with the kids. Suddenly the working spouse gets laid off. Spends weeks trying to file for unemployment benefits unsuccessfully, then the spouse that was working contracts Covid19 and dies. What the hell does that surviving spouse due to surviving in the middle of a global pandemic? There is no real relief coming because most of it was channeled through unemployment systems. They have lost their spouse, they lost their access to most of the relief money, they have to pay rent, utilities, buy food and even if they manage to do all of that, they then receive a $50,000 plus hospital bill for their dead spouse a month later. It’s obscene.
I mean, it sounds nice when all the politicians SAY no one should be billed for coronavirus care, but words are wind. Even if Congress passes legislation forcing insurance to cover COVID care, what if that spouse became critically ill from something else and needed that hospital care and then died. I guarantee that is happening too. That spouse, with almost no access to relief, will still get that massive hospital bill. It’s obscene.
That does not even factor that COVID death rates will decline while flu diagnosis skyrockets I bet. Since the insurer can’t profit off of covid care the incentives will become to misclassify diagnosis. Because someone MUST profit off of our healthcare needs.
Food insecurity
The level of food insecurity in this country was staggering before COVID, it is cataclysmic now. It’s only going to get worse. Foodnamk lines around the country are miles long. Foodbanks do not have the capacity t distribute food to that many people, so you can wait for hours and hours and get know food and end up going back tomorrow to try again.
Meanwhile, farmers that supply restaurants and schools and so on our plowing fields under to keep them from rotting on the vine and starting a plague of locusts or some other pest. This is a supply chain problem. I get it. This one in large part is on Trump, this could and should be the use of the DPA as well. Bring in military logistics teams to move that product to where it needs to be and get it distributed. They could do it through existing foodbanks by providing significant temporary refrigeration capacity or set up community food distribution centers at schools to reduce the massive lines at food banks.
But this is not all on Trump. Since he is not acting, Congress should be. This problem is an emergency, and if it persists for a few weeks more we are looking at darker times. Looting and rioting will become part of the story. For the life of me I don’t understand why I don’t see Congress in Washington (since they did not set up any capacity to legislate without being in Washington) passing legislation to fund food distribution on a massive scale right this moment. Waiting to may 4 might mean billions of tons of food plowed under. It does not grow back over night. Preserving that food source and getting it distributed should have been a top priority. Food will become the next toilet paper shortage if we are not careful.
Unemployment insurance is not relief
A recurring universal benefit would have been the efficient answer to providing relief. Unemployment insurance is designed to be a difficult and demeaning process. It is designed to screen people out as well. Millions of people will be denied unemployment because of arcane and byzantine processes and rules that were not removed in the relief legislation. Giving eligible people an additional $600 is nice and will help a lot of people, maybe most that go through the process and get the benefits. But in most states, if you have only worked someplace for 19 weeks, you will not be eligible for benefits. If you did not earn an average of $275 per week, even if you were working, you don’t get any benefit.
Millions of people who need more help because of this global pandemic will not get it as a result of running this mostly through the unemployment system.
None of this even considers the systemic racism and increased impacts on marginalized populations. I can’t even imagine what this crisis is doing to their lives.
Trump is a massive disaster, particularly in this crisis, but he is not the only story of failure. Our systems are failing us across the board.