It's how our government is structured to run though. There is no way for our federal government to appease 57 different states and territories. States say they want that then would waste valuable time angling for what they want, gumming up an already despicable bureaucracy, and almost certainly the federal government would end up getting sued.
We're definitely not structured perfectly for this but I think you have to try. How will places like Louisiana compete with New York for ventilators when Cuomo is on CNN every day telling equipment suppliers they'll pay anything for as many as they can produce? What happens when California secures orders for their PPE needs before Kansas gets hit and there's no manufacturing capacity available for Kansas? Already I know there are vastly different levels of PPE available just at different hospitals in the Bay Area. There's just a lot of reasons why this can get very ugly and could be made less ugly if the federal government steps in.
I agree with you, it's just another one of those structural issues this country has that makes dealing with something like this much more complicated than essentially everywhere else in the world. Also another thing that socialized medicine could help with, but I digress. If a president wanted the government to handle all of the distribution, how would they get the product? Would they first take over all the private companies manufacturing all of the ppe and ventilators?
Yeah, socialized medicine would help a ton. Like different hospitals just within the Bay Area have vastly different PPE inventory, which is pretty mumped up.
I don't know exactly how government distribution would work because I'm not intimately familiar with those supply chains. I think you would want all existing manufacturers to continue to manage production but have the government pause all existing contracts/shipments and distribute nationally based on need. Maybe it's as simple as negotiating with distributors to pause existing orders and reallocate. I'm guessing there's some sort of plan for this already, it just hasn't been put into action..
I honestly feel like Amazon could figure out and automate all this in a day or two.
Amazon or even someone smaller llike HEB could pretty easily "figure out and automate" how to get things to the areas of most need, but how do you define the areas of most need? To determine that you need good testing data, solid projections, accurate inventory counts at all hospitals, and honestly probably input from physicians and philosophers on the most humane allocations. that would require government coordination and mandates. And it seems obvious, but you'd also need to remove the profit motive from whomever is automating and you need someone like the president to decide it's important.
