So the reason why we have a Dallas health care worker with Ebola is probably the hospital's fault, or Obama's fault, but it's certainly not Congress's fault for cutting the budget for public health emergency preparedness in half since 2006, right?
A writer for Scientific American recently pointed out that funding for the Center for Disease Control's funding for public health preparedness has taken serious hits over the course of the past decade.
According to funding data analyzed by Judy Stone, annual funding for preparedness efforts have fallen by $1 billion between 2002 and 2013.
Stone, an infectious disease specialist, said that this reduction in funding hampered the U.S. in its response to the first Ebola patient in Dallas.
She lamented that politicians who are poorly informed about infectious disease prevention are in charge of resources for such efforts. She said that funding cuts have led to job losses at the local level, impacting local health officials ability to prepare for an outbreak.
Oh. Well, that might be a problem then., especially the fact the sharpest cuts came in Bush's second term, and then House Republicans since taking over the House in 2010 have cut more from the programs.
Starve a program designed to educate and prevent a deadly outbreak among public health professionals and then blame the government when something goes wrong, of course the solution being more cuts to health funding.
Seems about right to me. Good job, GOP. But let's order a few more F-22 Joint Strike Fighters at tens of billion each to blow up all those ISIS jets that don't exist, and we'll just cut more public health and emergency preparedness funding.
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