Coronavirus (political)

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by Giantone

Yes it's about small business's and the hospital workers and the people who really need it ,not Boeing getting 50 billion or the Kennedy Center getting money.


For God sake chico stop your shit!


"Small businesses, hospitals, frontline workers and state and local governments across the country are struggling to keep up with this national crisis. They need more help from the federal government and they need it fast. ... While the Trump Administration struggles to figure out how to distribute the funds provided for in the CARES Act, it’s clear that those appropriated amounts will not be enough to cover the tremendous need," Schumer and Pelosi said on Monday.

Democrats also want to make changes to the PPP, ensuring that half of the new $250 billion in funding goes through "community-based financial institutions that serve farmers, family, women, minority and veteran-owned small businesses." Democrats have raised concerns that the current setup of the program favors larger businesses with existing connections to a lender."

Giantone I usually dismiss your posts as biased but I have to say this one is accurate, and let me give you a window into how and why.

I work as an executive at a hospital, many of you know this. The CARES act set aside $100 billion in funds to support hospitals. They just distributed the first 30% of the funds to hospitals - and they did it without regard to which hospitals were actually bearing the burden of caring for patients with COVID.

All they did was take the $100B, multiply it by 30%, meaning they're distributing $30B. And they took that $30B and just distributed it to hospitals based on the proportion of Medicare revenue those hospitals had last year.

In other words, if a hospital in New York had 0.005% of the Medicare revenues in the country last year, and a hospital in Nebraska had 0.005% of Medicare revenues in the country last year, they got the exact same $ amount from this first distribution. Nevermind the fact that the hospital in NY is actually treating COVID-19 patients in droves, while the hospital in Nebraska barely has any.

So the hospital in Nebraska is sitting there with this windfall, and the hospital in New York doesn't have nearly enough to pay for PPE, ventilators, etc. etc.

It was lazy and poorly executed. The equivalent of just waving a wand and being done with it. It's easy to dismiss things we read in the news these days as biased, because few journalists these days can actually connect it to facts, and how things are actually done. But this is an illustration of how poorly Trump and his administration have managed the crisis. They don't understand nuances of the pandemic enough to manage it properly - so they just wave a wand as if they can't be bothered with careful planning and foresight.

Very disappointing.