Letter to the Editor: Ring around the rosie

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The pandemic is upon us, and there are not enough of anything that could
save lives. Respirators, masks, testing kits, ICU beds: who knew that we
would be needing this stuff?

Certainly not our Commander in Chief, who can’t even get a two sentence
tweet right. As the months went by, playing golf and hosting rallies, life
was too good to worry about a flu that was a hoax anyway. His budget
requests for next year cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention by 16%, and he planned to trim an extra $50 million from global
health security.

Trump’s cuts started back in 2018 with the elimination of disease security
programs and an 80% reduction in CDC funds for preventing global disease
outbreaks. $30 million was cut from the Complex Crises Fund that was to
deploy disease experts in time of health epidemics. Overall in 2018, Trump
called for a $15 billion in reduced healthcare spending. Who knew this would
be such a bad idea?

There are 80 million Americans who are underinsured or have no health
coverage at all. No other developed nation has left such a mass of citizens
unprotected from a health catastrophe. For weeks Trump downplayed the
danger, and did nothing to remediate the shortages of respirators and test
kits. It was like there was nobody home.

In a system bought and paid for by the major corporations, we have the most
egregious incompetent in charge of the public good. Ring around the rosie.

Fred Nagel
Rhinebeck, NY

(Opinions expressed in Letters to the Editor are those of the author and do not reflect those of Mid-Hudson News.)




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