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| Amid the Pandemic , it's not just Trump as a failure . Our Two party system of Democrats and Republicans failed big time to help the American people survive the COVID -19 lockdowns . The American Government has no safety net for anyone except the Rich. |
With the so called PANDEMIC running around you would not think that When lawmakers can’t agree on where to go or which route to take, they end up driving in circles, shouting at each other. (1)>>The U.S. government isn’t doing what it should to protect citizens, and President Trump changes his attitude about the epidemic at every press conference. Governments around the world have laid out varying instructions on how to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 which, for many people, has meant staying at home. But there’s been little direction on how to actually live through a pandemic. How does one reckon with quarantine life? (2)>>What about those with mental health issues strained by isolation? How about the self-quarantining individuals who are navigating symptoms but are not in need of immediate hospitalization — who is speaking to them? But the utter FAILURE of the two party system is amazing . Democrats and Republicans both elected House and Senate are a disgrace to put it in simple terms .Even to pass some legislation to help so many people who are suffering economically because of the COVID-19 shutdowns.COVID-19 is the Black Swan event that will bring down the American Society. For good or ill, that remains to be seen. (3)>>The Spanish Flu didn't take out entire Governments and Governmental Response was swift, landing on the problem like a ton of bricks. Today, every government has been behind the 8-ball. USFK soldiers haven't even gotten their NBC gear on yet and set up negative flow tents and done aggressive testing. Almost all US Presidential Candidates are old and have underlying health issues and all are attending massive rallies on a regular basis. This could very well be the first US Election in which all the candidates die on campaign and cause mass electoral chaos leading to civil war. Put simply, America's national government is foundering. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch (4)>>McConnell both are heading for a clash that might last for weeks on end. Congressional leaders from both parties privately believe they’ll reach a deal at some point: the stakes are too high for the nation’s health and economic well-being, not to mention Election Day is quickly approaching. But it may take several weeks of difficult negotiations — and public posturing — to strike an accord. The botched responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Port World deal are illustrative. Correcting this condition extends beyond the responsibility of the executive and legislative branches and ultimately rests with the American public. If the public does not become engaged and demand action, then it will get the government it deserves. The same, however, cannot be said for future generations, who will inherit a broken republic if we do not act quickly and effectively.The answer to the question of why the United States is in trouble is clear and stark... Government, and the people elected to populate it -- no matter how noble or gifted -- have been stymied in finding workable, effective, and -- in a few crucial instances -- even legal solutions to this array of tough issues. Our government is not working. It has become dysfunctional. With COVID-19 Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. (5)>>With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. (6)>>Pandemic relief is just one among a multitude of pressing problems we expect the public sector to be solve. the coronavirus outbreak makes it clear that the government needs to communicate clearly, operate transparently, and have the necessary resources and well-developed plans in place. Without these elements and a sense of urgency from the White House, the government cannot respond early and effectively to contain outbreaks, or slow their spread to prevent a pandemic from overwhelming our healthcare system. While the Trump administration took actions to curtail travel from China—where COVID-19 first appeared—in early February, the nature of global disease outbreaks is that there are rarely silver bullets, and efforts may need to be sustained and evolve over time to deal with the shifting threat. America’s lack of preparedness lies squarely with our dysfunctional government. The real lesson to be learned from our botched response to COVID-19.The health‐care system also faces short‐term supply constraints. It takes years to produce the thousands of new doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and EMTs that are needed when a crisis hits. It takes time to make more hospital beds, ventilators, ambulances, and personal protective equipment too. That we ran short of these resources when the coronavirus reached our shores is not a sign of a poorly run system, but of one governed by basic economic imperatives: (7)>>Health‐care businesses sensibly kept only enough resources on hand to deal with expected demand, because maintaining excess capacity was not worth the expense. I don't know why we're not protesting for universal healthcare in a during a medical pandemic it seems to me that the most important thing for people to go out there and protest is the fact that we don't have universal health care and the fact that we don't have a way to support ourselves because the economy you know we've been forced to stop working and people can't pay their bills those are the things to me those economic issues the healthcare issues are the things that people should have been marching in the streets for not that the other protests weren't important but i would think right now during the middle you know with what we're going through that would have been the most important thing um the thing is the hospitals were emptied out there were plenty of beds available there were there's plenty in fact at least 50 hospitals thus far have gone bankrupt from a lack of people in them during this pandemic so universal healthcare or not um that wasn't an issue we were do that's not why we're seeing a spike in cases here in the united states that's not why we're having issues here in the u.s we emptied out our hospitals to deal with this pandemic um compare best practices in other countries new zealand very quick and bold reaction covid19 is virtually extinct in new zealand once again it's not really it just they've been able to contain themselves and isolate for a little while but eventually they're going to have to come out eventually they're going to go travel the world eventually they're going to have visitors into their country and when that happens when they accept immigrants when they let their own citizens travel around when they open up their borders again when that happens they're going to get the virus unless they waitand they wait for the rest of the world to catch it. In the American national consciousness, our country has always been the richest and most advanced in the world. We have the best of everything. We are the most “first world” of all the developed countries. But in the United States of America, in the year 2020, the only categories we seem to be leading the rest of the world in are the numbers of confirmed infections and deaths from coronavirus. But universal coverage is only part of the sorry picture. The US for-profit health care “system” has brought about a spate of closures of hospitals that had ceased being profitable, including at least thirty that went bankrupt in 2019. Things have been particularly severe in rural areas, with 120 rural hospitals closing over the last decade, reaching a high with nineteen closures last year. If you had consciously tried to engineer a massive public health disaster, you couldn’t hope to match the ways in which the whole American system has been calibrated to transform this crisis into a catastrophe. Decades of racist, anti-worker, and plutocratic government policy has created the ideal conditions for a pandemic to turn the United States into a failed state.
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1)>>The U.S. government isn’t doing what it should to protect citizens.For the US, it is the failure to keep the Union of Big Labor, Big Government, and Big Business of the New Deal Era till Reagan shot it in the head, compounded by the failure to have Universal Healthcare and switching away from Technical Schools to primarily college education. This resulted in the average American being a poor laborer whose wages have not kept up with inflation and lacks collective bargaining power to ensure his fair slice. Losing a day of work for illness is a disaster equivalent to a tank of gas or his grocery bill for the week. A week of illness means a loss of his home. So he goes to work and infects others. Government by contrast has become incompetent, gerrymandered, and insulated from actual Democratic Change due to said gerrymandering as well as unlimited Corporate Money. Rather than address internal problems in the US and anger the Corporations, they create threats out of nothing and wage endless wars as a distraction.(2)>>What about those with mental health issues strained by isolation? . Social distancing is not easy for many to cope with, but it can be particularly difficult for people already struggling with mental health issues, according to health experts. Research from the 2002 SARS pandemic — a different kind of coronavirus — showed that quarantine can result in considerable psychological stress in the form of depressive symptoms and PTSD. Other research has shown that chronic social isolation increases the risk of mortality by 29%. In a University of Michigan study that began a week after the World Health organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, 28 percent of respondents said they used alcohol or drugs to feel better. More than 50 percent of people reported symptoms of anxiety every day or several days a week.Certain factors increased the risk of psychological problems, such as quarantines lasting longer than 10 days (which was associated mostly with post-traumatic stress), poor information about the rationale for the quarantine, and lack of access to necessary supplies and telecommunication services. (3)>>The Spanish Flu didn't take out entire Governments and Governmental Response was swift. The 1918 influenza pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S., according to the CDC. The pandemic occurred in three waves: the spring of 1918, fall of 1918, and winter and spring of 1919. In the midst of World War I, the federal government had limited resources to fight it.An estimated 30% of U.S. physicians were engaged in military service, so Congress passed funding in October 1918 to recruit doctors and nurses. At the time, there were no vaccines or lab tests to detect the virus, which meant government officials relied on “non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as quarantine, isolation and limits on public gatherings.The U.S. spends almost $1 trillion a year on national defense, but it handles our security so poorly that a virus born in a provincial city in China has killed thousands of us, sickened hundreds of thousands more, and sent us into economic freefall in barely a month. With a record like that, no one should want the government to have more responsibility for the health‐care system than it already does. (4)>>McConnell both are heading for a clash that might last for weeks on end. In a sign of the difficulties facing Congress, lawmakers can't even agree what round of relief they are currently negotiating. Some classify the last $484 billion relief bill passed in April as only an "interim" measure and describe the current talks as "phase 4." Other members refer to this round as "phase 5" because it will be the fifth coronavirus-focused bill.Among the key sticking points will be addressing the extra $600 in weekly unemployment benefits in the March CARES Act. Democrats want to see those benefits extended and are suggesting tying unemployment benefits to economic conditions. Senate Republicans, however, say the increase in unemployment benefits provide a disincentive for people to return to work.A potential compromise could center around “return to work” incentives. Regardless, the additional benefits for most people are likely to lapse, at least temporarily, before a deal gets struck. While the March law authorizes the extra benefits through the end of the month, the money will effectively stop being paid out on July 25 under the way most state unemployment systems are set up.(5)>>With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all. While countries like New Zealand and Germany have taken a unified national approach to fighting the virus — and are enjoying the fruits of a successful mitigation strategy —Without a coherent, evidence-based plan in place—a path forward, clear benchmarks, and an end in sight—the public and government officials may grow weary of physical distancing prematurely. The result would be repeated waves of exponential transmission followed by lockdowns, wreaking havoc on the economy and peoples’ lives. It will be far more devastating to our economy—and to public health—to experience waves and waves of virus response rather than properly return to normal when it is truly safe. Americans are willing to make sacrifices and do their part to break transmission, but they need to have faith that there is a plan in place that will work.To state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.Amid record unemployment claims and the disruption of commercial activity caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak, the public’s assessments of the U.S. economy have deteriorated with extraordinary speed and severity. Just 23% of Americans now rate economic conditions in the country as excellent or good, down sharply from 57% at the start of the year.Most now say the economy is in either only fair (38%) or poor (38%) shape. In January, just 9% of Americans said economic conditions were poor.The dramatic plunge in positive assessments of the national economy as a result of the coronavirus outbreak is steeper than declines in economic ratings seen during the last two recessions. Before they took a sudden negative turn, economic attitudes were historically positive. Just three months ago, the public’s views of the national economy were more positive than they had been at any point over the past 20 years. (6)>>Pandemic relief is just one among a multitude of pressing problems. Stimulus programs designed to keep the economy afloat during the coronavirus pandemic have failed to provide relief to Americans workers and companies who need it most. The coronavirus recession has split America in two: those who are still financially intact, and others facing lasting scars. Millions of Main Street businesses were existing month-to-month before the pandemic arrived, and now they are seriously hurting. Congress and the SBA must take immediate steps to ensure that the next round of small-business relief is actually distributed to those who need it most, and not just to those with lawyers and bankers to ensure they get to the front of the line. The relief and recovery packages have provided relatively timely support to Americans and will certainly help stave off longer-term economic damage. The legislation has also been widely criticized for flaws such as prioritizing industries over workers, inadequate funding for health care, and potentially hindering people who do not typically file tax returns from applying for one-time payments.The US Congress has approved fiscal spending of just under $3 trillion – more than the stimulus given after the global financial crisis. Small companies can take bank loans to cover running costs, wages and rent for a couple of months. If they do not lay off workers, the US Treasury will repay the loans. These loan schemes are conditional on companies freezing share buy-backs and capping management pay and bonuses.(7)>>Health‐care businesses sensibly kept only enough resources on hand to deal with expected demand. The United States, whose health system is a mix of private and public sources, is one of the only high-income countries that has not achieved universal health coverage: around 8.5 percent of the population go without coverage. The 2010 Affordable Care Act required most Americans to have insurance, but that requirement was eliminated by President Donald J. Trump’s administration in 2019.COVID-19 has put the cracks in America’s healthcare system under a microscope. Instead of a system designed to promote the public health, we see a system that imposes unpredictable costs while excluding millions of people, including many of the essential workers on whom we depend to meet our basic needs — the cashiers, drivers, delivery people, and cooks who ensure that, even during a pandemic, we have access to food and medicine and cleaning supplies. Although these workers face life-threatening risks to keep society functioning, the government has thus far shirked the financial responsibility of their treatment should they contract COVID-19.While most politicians do not support government-funded healthcare, their constituents do. A new national poll of over 1,700 likely voters from The Justice Collaborative Institute and Data for Progress shows that, regardless of party affiliation, the majority of American voters believe that the federal government should take responsibility for covering our healthcare. Nearly 70 percent of voters, including 58 percent of Republicans, support “a crisis care plan that ma[kes] the federal government responsible for paying all health care costs for as long as the United States remains under a state of emergency.”
