Did Hospitals Lie About Readiness in 2018?

Gee.  Looks like a lot of people were lying in 2018.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services inspector general issued a report telling the Trump administration there was good news on the pandemic front: Long-struggling hospitals had fortified their preparedness for an infectious disease outbreak.

Just a few short years after 71% of American hospital executives warned they were ill-prepared for a disease outbreak like the 2014 Ebola virus, 86% were reporting they were prepared and ready, the department’s inspector general declared.

The report boasted: “Hospital actions to improve preparedness included updating emergency plans, training staff to care for patients with EIDs (emerging infectious disease), purchasing additional supplies, and conducting EID-focused drills....

There are a couple of interesting quotes in the article.

...Like the federal bureaucracy that mismanaged early parts of the pandemic such as virus testing and failed to resupply respirators from the national stockpile after a 2009 swine flu pandemic, hospital bureaucracies were ill-prepared for the outbreak and provided far too rosy an assessment beforehand....

Hmmmmmm.  The CDC and FDA failed?  Ohhhhhh Nooooooes!!  Don't Fauci and Birks work in the Fed bureaucracy?? 

...The report from October 2018 underscores what experts have opined: that hospitals increasingly owned by mega-chains and worried about bottom lines weren’t willing or able to both stockpile and prepare for occasional pandemics and still keep profits healthy. So they chose the latter....

This is directly supported by reports that a local chain laid off RN's rather than move them to ER's or ICU's because the hospitals did not want to train the nurses.....after all, that costs money.....

Hmmmm.