Rather than give the federal government more things to do, we should ask it to do fewer things better. But Medicare for All is not the reform it needs. The SNS was also short of swabs, transport media, and the reagents that were necessary for COVID-19 testing to proceed. Rushed efforts to obtain ventilators and other medical equipment proved to be costly. The Cato Institute provides a consistent voice for individual liberty and limited government in the Washington policy arena. Every year, fraud, waste, and abuse consume hundreds of billions of Medicare dollars. This is by design; the COVID-19 response is divided among more than 2,000 state, local, and tribal public health departments.” Given this reality, planning and coordination were widely understood to be critical components of an effective response. work with the president to reform the federal agencies that were responsible for the country’s fragmented and ineffective response to COVID-19; ensure that the Strategic National Stockpile is supplied at a level sufficient to meet the immediate needs for medical equipment and supplies that an epidemic such as COVID-19 can be expected to generate; fund financial incentives that encourage people to be tested for COVID-19, to seek available treatments, to self‐​quarantine, and to participate in contract tracing efforts; and. Second, the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a master class in government failure. reject efforts to adopt Medicare for All in response to COVID-19 and instead eliminate the tax subsidies that encourage people to obtain health insurance through their employers and let people purchase health insurance that covers only catastrophes. View the profiles of people named Joey Cato. Promoting an American public policy based on individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peaceful international relations. But during an epidemic or pandemic, tracking and limiting the spread of disease require everyone’s participation—including uninfected people and people with mild symptoms who would not ordinarily seek medical treatment. David A. Hyman is a law professor at Georgetown. Since 1977, Cato scholars have been influential in a range of policy debates, including Social Security reform, medical savings accounts, term limits, welfare reform, fundamental tax reform, free trade, constitutional rights in the courts, school choice, civil liberties, and foreign policy issues. But they may be counterproductive when an epidemic occurs. Lee received a D grade and came in among the lowest-scoring governors in the Cato Institute’s biennial analysis of tax-and-spending choices – the Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors 2020. You can support the Cato Institute by shopping online through Amazon’s new AmazonSmile program. Advocates have sought to build a case for Medicare for All on the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the federal government’s inept response actually shows that it should not be entrusted with the massive additional administrative burdens that Medicare for All would entail. Employment‐​based health insurance does not do this. Canada ran short of drugs. Like COVID-19, Medicare is a case study in government failure. Proponents believe that if Medicare for All had been in place when the pandemic hit, more people would have been tested, the spread of the disease would have been easier to track, and many lives would have been saved. Experience with LASIK eye surgery, cosmetic surgeries and procedures, blood tests and body scans, and most recently with walk‐​in clinics run by Walmart and other retailers show this conclusively. “Lee scored poorly in this study because he has supported large spending increases,” the analysis reads. Indeed, the CDC, originally called the Communicable Disease Center, was created to address the risk of an epidemic. An enormous amount of effort went into these plans, but even so the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had long been concerned that the federal government was ill‐​prepared for an epidemic or pandemic. Some of the failures involved inadequate or ineffective preparation for a pandemic, while others involved ineffective or irrational responses to COVID-19 once it appeared on our shores. In addition, many of the ventilators that were in the SNS did not work, owing to a contract dispute between the government and the company that maintained them. Political intelligence analysis Charity org The result was a dramatic shortage of valid tests in populous areas, creating the false impression that the number of cases in the United States was low. The CDC’s coordination with state and local public health authorities was also poor. When its system went offline in mid‐​February and the flow of data stopped, local officials who asked how to handle incoming passengers were reportedly told, “Just let them go.” After reviewing hundreds of pages of internal correspondence, ProPublica wrote, “What comes through clearly is confusion, as the CDC underestimated the threat from the virus and stumbled in communicating to local public health officials what should be done.”. Cato depends solely on tax‐​deductible contributions from Sponsors who share our commitment to a free and prosperous society. The federal government “had dozens of such plans, totaling thousands of pages, issued by different agencies and different presidential administrations, with little thought to how they would be combined or who would implement them.” When critics condemned the Trump administration for ignoring the pandemic plans that the Obama administration left behind, the Trump administration responded by pointing to other plans that were developed more recently. America’s health care system was not responsible for these problems. In a 2018 report, the GAO noted that “since 2009, [it had] identified broad, cross‐​cutting issues in leadership, coordination, and collaboration that arise from fragmentation throughout the complex interagency, intergovernmental, and intersectoral biodefense enterprise.” The GAO also observed that HHS officials were still “unsure how decisions would be made, especially if addressing gaps or opportunities to leverage resources involved redirecting resources across agency boundaries.” As the GAO dryly noted, “Without clearly documented methods, guidance, processes, and roles and responsibilities for enterprise‐​wide decision‐​making,” a transition “from traditional mission stovepipes toward a strategic enterprise‐​wide approach that meaningfully enhances national capabilities” was unlikely to occur. It is certainly true that the American health care system has no shortage of pathologies and needs a complete overhaul. All you have to do is visit smile​.ama​zon​.com, log in using your usual Amazon account details, and select Cato as your charity. Consider its attempt to screen passengers and facilitate contact tracing by designating a small number of airports as entry points for Americans returning from China. Official government reports going back to the early 2000s warned that the supply of ventilators in hospitals and the SNS fell far short of the number that would be needed in the event of an epidemic or pandemic. In July 1976, the name was changed to the Cato Institute. Analysis of the many deficiencies in the federal government’s response to COVID-19 can usefully be categorized as planning failures, preparation failures, and implementation failures. In 2010, HHS sought to close the gap by hiring Newport Medical Instruments to build a fleet of inexpensive portable devices. The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. The effort was hampered by the CDC’s “decades‐​old notification system,” which could not handle the flood of information. Please call 1-800-767-1241 or email catostore@cato.org for discounted rates. When a fast‐​spreading disease throws millions of people out of work, many employees lose their insurance along with their jobs. The U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a master class in government failure. Interns receive a stipend of $1000 per month. The government’s record of mismanaging the existing Medicare program makes the same point. A good start would be to improve the federal government’s ability to respond to epidemics and pandemics. The SNS proved its value in responding to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the H1N1 epidemic in 2009. The COVID-19 pandemic neither justifies putting the manufacturing sector under government control nor warrants a government‐​run health care system. New York ... Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20001-5403. Medicare for All would have the same effects, and the taxes needed to pay for it would make people poorer and impede economic growth. “At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials … telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would ‘shut you down’ if CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.” Also, because the CDC had not involved private labs, academic institutions, or other organizations capable of creating tests, there was no alternative development pipeline. COVID-19 also revealed to many people a long‐​standing problem with employment‐​based health insurance. Like the United States, countries with national health care systems also sought to “flatten the curve” so that their systems could manage the spike in demand for treatments. There were other signs of trouble with the SNS. For more information about becoming a Cato Sponsor, please contact the Development Team: CATO SPONSORSHIP CATO INSTITUTE 1000 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, N.W. The initial version of the COVID-19 diagnostic test was faulty because of problems at the CDC’s lab. and publications. Given the universal nature of these challenges, it is implausible that Americans would have fared significantly better had Medicare for All been in place. But the existence of a short‐​term crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic should not blind us to the long‐​term (and far greater) need for incentives to moderate health care consumption in ordinary times. Facebook. Experience with COVID-19 in Other Countries, Creative Many politicians, interest groups, and commentators contend that the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the United States desperately needs Medicare for All. Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This essay is a part of the Pandemics and Policy series. Countries with universal health care systems experienced these problems for the same reason the United States did. However, patients with other medical problems would still need a solution for their problems with employment‐​based health insurance. Instead, reform should focus on improving the performance of the federal agencies that were responsible for the country’s fragmented and ineffective response to COVID-19. When patients arrived at hospitals, overworked medical professionals did the best that they could with the available resources. The CDC also botched the testing process. Enter your Cato Institute Internships username. The federal government was not ready for COVID-19, even though it has dealt with epidemics and pandemics for more than a century. Thank you for supporting the Cato Institute through AmazonSmile! Many of the politicians and commentators who are making a COVID‐​19‐​based case for Medicare for All have always been enthusiastic proponents of Medicare for All. 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