What's clear is that Texas Presbyterian was not prepared to deal with such a contagious disease. Why, we're not sure, but you can bet everything in your bank account that just about any local hospital would be in the same boat. And what is undoubtedly a factor in that is the massive budget cuts to public health programs in the U.S. in the last decade.
We can start with the NIH cuts, which the agency's director says delayed development of an Ebola vaccine. "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready," he told Huffington Post.
But here at home, two programs that deal directly with emergency preparedness for hospitals have been cut. The CDC's emergency preparedness program, which provides funding and staff in state and local health departments. In just the last six years, more than 45,700 jobs were lost in state and local health departments because of federal funding cuts. Additionally, the Hospital Preparedness Program, a state-federal cooperative administered by the Department of Health and Human Services has been slashed. In 2003, its budget was $520 million. In 2014 and 2015, it's $255 million.
Those are two programs which should have been ready in Dallas, Texas, (or anywhere else in the country) to help Texas Presbyterian respond immediately and effectively to an Ebola patient showing up on its doorstep. We don't know what their role in this case was, if they had one. But we do know that both programs have been decimated by Republicans who have held the federal budget hostage for the last six years.
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