Feds Blew $100 Billion on Extra Hospital Beds, Got FEWER Hospital Beds

(AP Photo/Earl Neikirk)

“Fifteen days to flatten curve” was all about making sure we didn’t run out of hospital beds for sick people, whether they had COVID or something else.

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In the heat of those panicky early days of the pandemic, Congress passed (and President Donald Trump signed) the unprecedented $2.2 trillion-with-a-T Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES).

Among the law’s many, many very, very expensive provisions was $100,000,000,000 (that’s one million dollars, one hundred thousand times) “designed to provide an influx of money to hospitals and other health care entities responding to the coronavirus pandemic.”

That’s according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which also notes that “averages out to about $108,000 per hospital bed in the United States.”

Guess what we got for our money?

Would you believe… fewer hospital beds? Of course you would.

It seems like only earlier today I was writing about how Anthony “Doctor” Fauci’s NIAID blew $205,000 turning monkeys transgender, so I suppose we should be happy the damage was limited to six figures and some small number of monkeys.

Kaiser argued at the time that “this $100 billion fund could provide crucial and timely support.”

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Except:

Staffed Hospital Beds

In case that chart is too small to easily read, the US currently has about 50,000 fewer staffed hospital beds right now than we had in 2020.

The numbers come from the Department of Health & Human Services’ HealthData.gov and came to me courtesy of Twitter user Stinson Norwood.

Norwood added, “I wish someone would ask Psaki what happened to all that CARES money to bolster hospital capacity.”

Indeed.

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But wait. From there it gets really weird:

Not one to take an anecdote as data, I looked into hospitals closing ICUs or reducing bed counts.

Sure enough:

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I could go on, but you get the point: We spent a hundred thousand million dollars we didn’t have on increased medical services we didn’t get.

Worse, staffing shortages — caused in large part by vaccine mandates for wary frontline medical workers — have forced hospitals to actually reduce the number of staffed hospital beds.

So where did all the money go?

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