Conservatives Want Government To Run Like Corporations-- As The Former President Of A Big One, I Can Tell You That Would Mean A Hundred Million Americans Would Die Before The Pandemic Ends

Generally speaking, corporations run for just one reason: profit for the shareholders and-- dirty little secret-- profit for the largely unfettered management team. I wasn't really the president of a corporation-- just the president of a division of one, TimeWarner.

See these half dozen fellas? They run 6 U.S. health insurance companies. They're all grotesquely overpaid. Suppose the U.S. went back to an Eisenhower era tax structure for the super-wealthy-- with a top marginal rate of 91%. What that meant was that any individual making over $200,000 (something like $2 million in today's money) would pay 91% on the income over $200,000. Let's round it down to favor of the plutocrats to 90% on anything over $2 million. This is very roughly what these corporate CEOs would be left with after the 90% tax:

• Michael Neidorff, Centene- $3.91 million
• David Cordani, Cigna- $3.72 million
• Bruce Broussard, Humana- $4.52 million
• Barry Smith, Magellan- $2.63 million
• David Wichmann, United Health- $3.95 million
• Ken Burdick, Wellcare- $3.9 million

That would never work-- unless all corporate CEOs across all industries were subject to the same rate. Then it would make sense and it would work fine. All these fellas would still be rich and, more important, as rich as their peers.

Corporate America-- just like the conservative politicians they own and who bolster the status quo that puts them at the top of the heap (and so much richer than, say school teachers, firemen, medical care responders...)-- has failed our society again and again. The pandemic makes that crystal clear even to those with clouded vision and washed brains. On Thursday Washington Post reporters Jeanne Whalen, Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger wrote about how the mask shortage shows exactly why corporate rule is bad for America. Mike Roman has been the CEO of Minnesota-based 3M for about two years. His assail compensation is $9,843,753. Trump attacked 3M on Thursday, trying to shift the blame away from his own narcissism, incompetence and dysfunctional regime. Roman replied yesterday:





Month ago, Pence visited 3M, the top manufacturer of protective masks and ventilators. The company had already doubled its mask manufacturing output in January, when Trump was still calling the pandemic a hoax and taking no serious action to prepare for it at all. Pence praised Roman at the time. The Post reported that "With its factories in South Dakota and Nebraska cranked up and running around the clock, 3M was on pace to double its global output to nearly 100 million a month, according to the company. But in a private meeting shortly before Pence spoke publicly, company leaders had warned the vice president that 3M had a problem, according to people familiar with the session, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door discussion. Chief executive Michael Roman said he was concerned that repurposing the company’s industrial masks, which made up the bulk of its production, for use by doctors and nurses could leave the company vulnerable to lawsuits. The lack of a liability waiver from Congress-- a protection the industry has sought for years-- would hinder full distribution of the gear, he said. While all N95 masks, also known as respirators, filter at least 95 percent of airborne particles, masks for construction and medical use vary in design and fit-- and are subject to different regulations. The liability issue, which set off a scramble by Pence’s aides, was one of a number of roadblocks that delayed the distribution of a basic protective item desperately needed to stem the spread of the virus."

The confluence of a slow initial response by the Trump administration, its wariness of compelling the industry to produce gear and a long-running debate about granting manufacturers legal protection in a health emergency contributed to a critical shortage of masks to front-line workers, according to an examination by the Washington Post of the early weeks of the crisis.

On Thursday evening, hours after this report published online, Trump announced he had invoked the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to compel 3M to provide more N95 masks for use by medical workers in the United States, a sharp turnabout in the administration’s posture toward the company.

Trump later tweeted: “We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. ‘P Act’ all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing-- will have a big price to pay!”

The dearth of masks for medical workers in the United States, despite weeks of warnings as the virus ravaged parts of China and Italy, has become symbolic of the nation’s wider failure to properly prepare for the pandemic.

The first coronavirus case in the United States was reported Jan. 21 in the state of Washington. By early February, the federal government had declared a public health emergency. But it took nearly a month, until March 2, for the Food and Drug Administration to issue an emergency order giving manufacturers formal blessing to begin repurposing industrial masks for health-care workers, a necessary step to getting construction masks into hospitals.

It was another two weeks before Congress passed and President Trump signed emergency legislation that included the protection against lawsuits that 3M sought, settling a long-running political battle over liability when industrial masks are used in health emergencies.

The liability waiver-- which was then extended to future health emergencies in the $2 trillion stimulus package-- helped open the floodgates. 3M is on track to distribute at least 31 million masks to health-care workers this month, up from 5 million a month it was providing earlier this year, according to the company and White House officials.

On March 21, the federal government awarded manufacturers contracts to produce about 600 million N95 masks over the next 18 months to supplement the private sector’s supply.

By then, the virus had been spreading in the United States for two months, and the need for masks was so dire that some doctors in Seattle and New York were reusing them or making their own from craft supplies.

“It is a basic role of government to provide defense, in this case against a public contagion. But they have not met the test,” said Rhonda Medows, a doctor in hard-hit Seattle, who serves as an executive with one of the region’s largest medical centers.

The need to dramatically ramp up U.S. production and distribution of masks should have been apparent early on in the crisis, former disaster preparedness officials said. For years, public health advocates had warned that the U.S. national stockpile of medical supplies was woefully inadequate. Domestic mask makers had repeatedly tried to sound the alarm about the country’s overreliance on foreign-made masks-- a problem that became acute when China shut down its factories as the virus swept through that country.

Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for Pence, said the vice president worked intently on procuring more masks from the moment Trump tapped him to lead the coronavirus response in late February.

“We were trying to do this in any way that we could, as fast as we could, understanding the urgency of the issue,” she said.

...Roman, the company’s CEO, said in a March 22 statement that the new law helped “ensure that all N95 disposable respirators can be used in healthcare settings, and has enabled us to increase distribution to those workers beginning this weekend.”

3 M declined to comment on Roman’s private remarks in his meeting with Pence. In a statement, the company said it did not delay shipments, adding that it shipped more than 1.35 million industrial masks to health-care customers in the two weeks before the law was signed. But the company acknowledged the volume increased after it secured liability protection.

“Don’t talk to your lawyers if you’re making masks or gowns or ventilators,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University School of Medicine. “See where the need is and get moving as fast as you can.”

In the past week, 3M said it delivered 10 million N95 respirators to health-care facilities across the country. The company is now manufacturing 35 million N95 masks a month in the United States, more than 90 percent of which are designated for health care-workers, it said, and expects to be up to 50 million a month in June. 3M did not respond to questions about the mix of medical versus industrial masks it is now producing.

Still, the need is outstripping supply, industry officials and health-care experts said.

Until Thursday, the Trump administration had refused to use one major tool at its disposal, the Defense Production Act, to force companies to produce and distribute masks, part of a pattern of showing deference to private industry in fighting the outbreak.

Instead, the president had praised companies that had volunteered to help produce masks. On Sunday, Trump outraged many doctors and nurses by questioning whether they need as many masks as they have requested, even suggesting without evidence that some were being squandered or “going out the back door.”

“We’re delivering millions and millions of different products and all we do is hear that, ‘Can you get some more?’ ” he told reporters on Sunday, citing the case of a New York hospital where mask usage has spiked. “I don’t think it’s hoarding; I think it’s maybe worse than hoarding.”

A global crunch

For two decades, experts on pandemics have cited the need for mass stockpiles of protective equipment and rapid production to replace quickly diminished supplies as key steps to contain outbreaks.

“What was done in the U.S. in early January-- in those precious weeks-- would have been critical,” said Christopher M. Kirchhoff, a former Pentagon and White House national security aide who worked on the Ebola mobilization and later put together a “lessons learned” report about the experience.

...In a normal year, the U.S. health-care system uses about 25 million medical N95s, according to Premier, an organization that helps hospitals purchase supplies. Many of the masks are disposable and meant to be used once.

HHS has estimated that the United States could need as many as 3.5 billion N95 masks during a pandemic.

A 2016 planning document prepared by the National Security Council called on the White House to prioritize procuring protective equipment in case of a pandemic. The planning guide, first reported by Politico, drew on the expertise of multiple agencies. It was developed by a White House medical preparedness task force established by President Barack Obama but disbanded by the Trump administration in 2018. White House officials have said the task force’s functions were folded into another office.

At the time, the issue was hypothetical. Now, nations around the world are grappling with the sheer scope of the need. Massive quantities of the filtration masks are sought now not just in the United States, but also in nearly every nation of the world.

The need has spiked just as countries have closed borders and worked to stockpile their own supplies.

“The pressure is just so intense because of the global nature of this,” said Khatereh Calleja, president of the Healthcare Supply Chain Association.

Despite known worries about possible pandemics, manufacturers said one reason for the shortage has been a decision by many hospitals to adopt just-in-time purchasing of items such as masks as a cost-saving mechanism.

“Manufacturers don’t carry inventory, and if you do, you are less competitive,” said Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, a trade group that represents mask-makers. “They produce what they need to satisfy orders. That’s what has happened to global manufacturing.”

American manufacturers have also been warning for years that more and more production of medical supplies, including masks, has been relocated overseas, including to China. That has reduced costs for American health-care companies but has made the supply chain more vulnerable to global pandemics.

China, which experienced the world’s first coronavirus outbreak, was quick to stop exporting masks its own doctors and nurses needed at home, making stockpiling more difficult in recent months, U.S. health-care executives say.

An analysis by the Associated Press last month found that there had been no shipments of medical grade N95 masks from China since Feb. 19 and only 13 shipments of nonmedical N95 masks, which was about half as many that had arrived in the same period a year earlier.

To satisfy demand in the case of emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government in 1999 established the Strategic National Stockpile, a last-resort cache of drugs and supplies intended to be tapped only in moments of crisis.

But the national stockpile was significantly depleted during the H1N1 influenza outbreak of 2009, when 85 million N95 respirators were distributed from the cache, and was never significantly replenished despite repeated warnings and requests from health-care and industry groups.

Federal officials said in March that the stockpile contained about 12 million N95 respirators and 30 million surgical masks, a tiny percentage of what is now needed by health-care workers and emergency responders.

The Trump administration has begun distributing the meager supplies, but with so much more demand than supply, many states have received only a fraction of their requests.

By this week, the stockpile was nearly exhausted, The Post reported Wednesday.

In a statement, HHS said Secretary Alex Azar pushed for more funding for the stockpile and began transferring supplies to Washington state, site of the nation’s first outbreak, on March 1.

The agency noted, however, that “health care supply chains are private sector driven.”

Some experts said mask production and distribution could have been accelerated if Trump had more quickly embraced the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law that gives the commander in chief the power to marshal resources in time of war and order industrial manufacturers to produce specific items.

“The administration has considerable power in this regard,” said Nicole Lurie, who served as a top HHS official in the Obama administration.

Trump did invoke the act last week to compel General Motors to manufacture ventilators to help handle the surge of coronavirus patients. On Thursday, he used the act to force six companies to facilitate the supply of materials for ventilators, along with ordering 3M to provide more masks.

“We are, as you know, using the act, but we use it only when necessary,” he told reporters last week. “We use it as leverage. We generally don’t have to use it to accomplish what we want to accomplish.”

...Agency officials did not say what caused the delay or respond directly to a question about whether they regretted not moving faster. In a statement, the FDA said it began creating “a more streamlined access to market” for some protective masks in 2018.

On March 10-- five days after Pence visited 3M-- Azar went further, using his authority under a law adopted during the avian flu outbreak to declare that manufacturers, distributors and other parties would be immune from federal and state lawsuits if they distributed products in accordance with the FDA emergency action. Instead, the federal government would assume the liability risk.

But manufacturers wanted the protections to be reinforced in new legislation.

“Whether or not the agency chooses to issue that order, it had to be tested in a court of law,” Johnson said. “Without clear cut legislative action that allows the government to take on that liability... our members would still face our day in court.”

Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said a pandemic was the wrong time for companies to dwell on their liability concerns.

The dire medical need “was very clear in early March,” he said. “You didn’t have to be a fancy epidemiologist or Dr. [Anthony S.] Fauci to know what was coming,” referring to the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The liability language that the industry was seeking was included in an early draft of the first coronavirus relief act that Trump signed into law on March 6, but House Democrats cut the language, according to people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), who opposed including the provision in that bill, said what the industry wanted amounted to “an indefinite blanket liability.”

Democrats agreed to include key liability protections that the industry was seeking in the second coronavirus-related bill, passed on March 18. It explicitly covered many industrial masks used to combat coronavirus until October 2024.

Pallone said he agreed with that approach because it was a “targeted liability waiver” with an end date.

On March 19, the day after the bill was signed into law, Pence described the measure as having opened the floodgates.

“Following the signing of last night’s bill, all of those masks now have liability protection and the companies can sell industrial masks to hospitals,” he said during the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing.

Standing beside him, Trump echoed that view. “They had a big problem with liability,” he said, in an apparent reference to 3M.

Roman, the company’s CEO, also cast the law as a game-changer.

“As I write this, more than 500,000 respirators are on the way from our South Dakota plant to two of the more critically impacted areas, New York and Seattle, with arrivals expected starting tomorrow. We are also ready to expedite additional shipments across the country,” he said in a statement.

Later in the month, the industry got even more cover when Senate Republicans included liability protection as part of the $2 trillion stimulus package, over the objections of some Democrats, who had said such a move would give away too much.

“Let me be very clear that this provides immunity for respirator manufacturers from this point forward,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) during a floor debate over the measure in mid-March.

The final bill-- which waived manufacturer liability for more types of industrial masks used during the coronavirus crisis, as well as future public-health emergencies-- was signed into law by Trump on Friday.

Last night, Bill Maher asked Bernie what he would do right now if he were president. Bernie-- as you would guess-- was more than ready for that question! Watch what he told Maher and his audience-- in great detail for TV. Maher, of course, asked the standard "How are you going to pay for it?"