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California once had mobile hospitals, ventilator stockpile but dismantled them
- twblalock 7y agoThere 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.
- jiqiren 7y agoOnly 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 7y agoNot 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.
- twblalock 7y ago> Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about. This isn't economics. It's politics. How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services? I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive recession that we were still climbing out of.
- selimthegrim 7y agoThis is Governor Moonbeam here. Remember what he was selling in the seventies? He could have run with it.
- ipqk 7y agoMaybe by mentioning the swine flu pandemic that had just happened in 2009? Californians live in earthquake country – they understand preparing for cataclysmic event in the medium-to-far future.
- masonic 7y agoIn contrast, CA budgets $98 million/year just for full MediCal plans for undocumented people age 0-26.
- ceejayoz 7y 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 7y 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 7y agoI 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.
- selimthegrim 7y agoI was at UCSB at the time and I remember incensed undergrads camping out in the public spaces for weeks.
- scruple 7y agoYep, you just jogged my memory. I was living and working in Goleta at the time and I definitely recall seeing those folks every time I went to campus and even IV of the course of a few weeks.
- ip26 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
- parineum 7y 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.
- twblalock 7y 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.
- wtdo 7y agoThe swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoA pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Next up in California: AR1Kstorm.
- philwelch 7y agoYou're not wrong, but a near miss can seem a lot like "crying wolf" to an ignorant populace.
- wbl 7y agoProp 13 strikes again. Due to it CA has wild revenue shifts.
- briandear 7y agoWhat are they doing with all of the sales and income taxes I pay?
- thedance 7y agohttp://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21/#/Home
- WalterBright 7y agoThe idea is to bank the surplus during the fat years. But no politician was ever re-elected for having a budget surplus.
- thedance 7y agoJerry Brown passed the California "rainy day fund" in November 2014 on the same ballot on which he was re-elected. Literally re-elected on a budget surplus platform.
- tathougies 7y agoToo bad the surplus came from cutting the emergency preparedness programs that ought to have been funded by a surplus.
- WalterBright 7y agoHaving a budget surplus platform is not at all the same thing as having a budget surplus.
- Gibbon1 7y agoReminds me. Prop 13 was passed in the 70's when Brown was governor. One of the things the proponents hammered on was Brown's budget was running a surplus.
- briandear 7y agoThat’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.
- twblalock 7y agoHow 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 7y agoYour 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 ...
- bsder 7y agoIt 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 7y agoAre you trying to make the case for single party rule here?
- dodobirdlord 7y agoCalifornia objectively seems to operate much better since Prop 25 excluded the minority party from having a say on the budget. The behavior in a two-party system of a minority party that knows it's going to be a minority party indefinitely is frequently to sabotage everything possible in hopes of making the ruling party's life difficult, or to make them look incompetent. Stripping them of power doesn't turn legislating into dictatorial rule by fiat, it just moves it into the consensus-building processes of the majority party. Two-party rules with a sidelined minority party looks a lot like a coalition government in a multi-party system.
- bsder 7y agoThe jungle primaries actually make even that case better. You don't have the case where some nitwit edges out a reasonable candidate in the primary and then wins the general simply because they have (D) or (R) next to their name. In California's case, if we send two Democrats to the general election, the Republicans get to weigh in on which they find more acceptable. It forces the candidates to the actual center. It would work that way for two Republican candidates as well, but a whole host of Republicans simply quit after we un-gerrymandered the state.
- tathougies 7y agoAh right, the fact that a democrat governor got rid of pandemic preparations made by a Republican one is the fault of republicans
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoSerious question: is $26B a big deficit for California?
- Gibbon1 7y agoIt's not the end of the world. California currently almost 40 million people. So $650 per capita.
- jfnixon 7y agoIt is just a bad choice to cut emergency preparedness. This is California, how many mass transit boondoggles survived the 2011 budget cuts?
- GeekyBear 7y 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.
- jiqiren 7y agoI 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 7y agoMakes you wonder what earthquake emergency infrastructure has been shut down during cost cutting.
- briandear 7y agoSanta 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.
- thedance 7y agoI don't get it. What disaster preparedness role does RHV play that the much larger and extremely nearby SJC cannot play?
- RyJones 7y agoIt gives you more loading zones and more approach/departure windows.
- thedance 7y agoThe idea that a bunch of GA misfits flying their mosquitos will be helpful in case of a major city being cut off by land is something only the AOPA could come up with. In that event they'll be landing C-5's and 744's full of potatoes at SJC. One flight of a 744 is worth 400 GA flights.
- kichik 7y agoWithout paywall: http://web.archive.org/web/20200328132638/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators http://web.archive.org/web/20200328132638/https://www.latime...
- roenxi 7y agoI 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 7y agoI 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.
- roenxi 7y agoI'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-californias-finances-are-not-back-in-black/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...
- bsder 7y agoGov Jerry Brown still had to deal with dipshit Republicans until the jungle primaries got rid of most of them after 2012. California seems to have a lot fewer budgetary issues now that we got rid of most of the Republicans. Funny how getting rid of people who don't want government to work actually improves the functioning of government.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
- fra 7y agoEdit: 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/coronavirus-california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
- masonic 7y agoLAT is clearly credited in this version, but this avoids the native paywall.
- raspasov 7y agoCurrent 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 7y agoThing 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 7y agoI'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 7y 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 7y agoWhen 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 7y agoDoes 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 7y agoA 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.