They tried to inoculate an entire school for H1N1. Instead they inoculated one-fifth of a school because not enough permission forms had been lined up. We’ve now reached the point where it’s a demonstrable fact that the federal government can’t even handle stage-managed health care correctly.
Tough to know who to side with here. On one hand you side against the foot-dragging parents, since many of them are anti-vaccine Blue State morons who fear that H1N1 scientists neglected to take their kids’ unique auras into account. On the other hand you have to blame the government too since this was their stunt and it was their responsibility to make sure everything went smoothly.
If you were a corporate PR lackey and your job was to set up an event and you screwed up this badly, you’d be fired:
A U.S. government media event to promote H1N1 school vaccinations on Friday included VIPs, cute kids and a phalanx of television cameras — but only one in five children at the school had proper parental consent to get immunized. “This school was ready to go,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius… But 80 percent of the student body were ineligible for vaccinations due to missing paperwork during the day-long swine flu clinic. Federal officials did not want to discuss the turnout.
Of course the total number of people fired over this train wreck will be zero. In a large bureaucracy it’s always easier to move someone elsewhere than to fire them. That’s true for corporations as well, but do it long enough in a company and it collapses (cf. GM).
In government you can allow inefficiencies to build indefinitely. The post office, to take a random hypothetical, is hurtling towards bankruptcy and will soon need a bailout. So if we had a reason to believe that ObamaCare would resemble the post office, that would be a real cause for concern.
Speaking of which, the cost of the fed’s H1N1 school campaign is projected to be $6.4 billion. So let’s be generous and say it only ends up costing $7 billion. H1N1 has killed 76 U.S children since April, of which 20% were healthy when they got the disease (the rest had underlying conditions). So the US government has decided to spend roughly $500,000,000 per healthy child.
And to think – there are people who believe government health officials misallocate resources in response to faddish health trends and exurban hysteria.
References:
* US school swine flu event shows vaccine challenge [Reuters]
* How is that Post Office comparison working now? [Hot Air]
Previously:
* Health Care Coverage
* British Health System Denies Woman Treatment For 7 Years Because “Alzheimer’s Is Not A Health Condition”
* Dems: We’ll Finance Health Care With Cigarette Tax That Will Cause People To Stop Buying Cigarettes
