General Discussion

... situations like Katrina.

More recently, during the Covid pandemic (Trump's Folly) I noticed that our local hospital erected a large tent for overflowing Covid cases. I stayed away, figuring the last thing the hospital needed was an old military medic asking about the deployment—questions like who deployed the tent and who was staffing it.

But it brought back memories of the completeness and skills of the mobile hospitals and the military medics who manned them under extreme conditions. All this occurred within hours of an event that required the complete resources we used to have.

Imagine having a resource with equipment and skills to provide help when needed—help that could be ORDERED by the president or his administration to deploy. Think of the skills even a small community would need to survive in an emergency, and the military mobile hospitals had the skills.

We had not only medics, but we also had engineers to maintain the power system and waste management, cooking facilities to feed three meals a day to staff and patients, veterinary services for animals affected by the disaster, dentists for any required dental care from a toothache to trauma care, logistical services to keep the hospital running and supplied, communication technology to stay in contact with families of the injured and yes even had facilities for those that were killed by the event.

And the "idiot(s)" dismantled it all. They failed to realize that with a straightforward order, a COMPETE 150-bed hospital could be on the ground anywhere in the U.S.A. within 24-48 hours. AND staffed. Try that in a privatized system where staffing might be the biggest obstacle.

From my experience as a surgical tech, if we were deployed, I knew the surgeons I would be working with and their expectations from those of us who stood next to them. We were a trained team who knew the playbook.