https://foxnews.com/politics/trump-cites-report-cuomo-passed-on-chance-to-buy-16000-ventilators-in-2015The spirit of bipartisanship and goodwill that has been fostered between President Trump and some of the nation’s Democratic governors amid the coronavirus pandemic seems to eroding as Trump and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo traded shots on Tuesday over who is responsible for a dearth of desperately needed ventilators in the state so far hardest hit by the contagion.
Trump accused Cuomo on Tuesday of failing to buy 16,000 ventilators back in 2015 and instead implementing a “death panel” to assign which patients should be put on a ventilator.
“New York governor Cuomo rejected buying for a pandemic,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall on the coronavirus. “He had 16,000 he could have had and didn’t buy them.”
Trump did not clarify where he got the number of ventilators that Cuomo did not purchase, but an opinion piece from last week in the New York Post made the claim that “[i]n 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million.”
“It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for pandemic was the right thing to do,” Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in her piece for the tabloid.
New York state public health officials established a few years ago established a task force to investigate the lack of ventilators in the state and find a way to remedy the situation.
The task force discovered that were 7,250 ventilators in New York hospitals and about 1,900 in nursing homes – with most of them already in use. Even with the state’s own stockpile, that task force said there was only 2,800 total ventilators available, despite health officials’ warnings that a major outbreak could require 18,600 New Yorkers to be on the machines each week during the crisis’ peak.
Instead of buying the ventilators in 2015, the task force created a priority system for who would be put on a ventilator – red being the most dire, blue being the least – and assigned a triage officer, or “death panel” as Trump said, to make the life-or-death decisions.What the fuck do we even have a government for anyway?
A task force to figure out what to do about not having ventilators? I have an idea
GO FUCKING BUY SOME SO YOU'RE READY
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NEW YORK’S VENTILATOR RATIONING PLAN. “Cuomo could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece or a total of $576 million in 2015. It’s a lot of money but less than the $750 million he threw away on a boondoggle ‘Buffalo Billion’ solar panel factory. When it comes to state budget priorities, spending half a percent of the budget on ventilators is a no brainer.”
You can buy a decent SUV for $38k.