To All the A**holes who are Insulting the Flying Ebola Nurse: Shut Your F***ing Faces.

[calimary]

203. AHA! You hit on something REALLY important here! URGENTLY important.

It's the new "F-word." FUNDING.

FUNDING!!!!! FUNDING, DAMMIT!!!!!!!!

I don't think we're gonna get that far, really. Congress may be embarrassed into relaxing funding restrictions maybe just this once. But that whole attitude has to be revisited and re-thought. We CANNOT cheap out on this. We CANNOT nickel-and-dime this. We CANNOT go with the minimum precautions. Anybody wanna bet their lives on the minimum precautions?

You make a painfully good point, too, about how no one signed up for Agent Orange. Totally! You'll get no disagreement from me on that one. And I'm not one of those who dismiss people who went over to Iraq and fought and came back mangled for life - "DUH... they volunteered..." Well, yeah, they volunteered, but trusting that they'd be protected and covered and would be well-cared-for if something happened. And as we can see, when they come home, they're nickeled and dimed. We hear again and again how we somehow can't afford it.

And THAT is the crux of the matter. I firmly believe that we CAN afford it. If we can afford all the money and the lavish spending pumped into war-making, if we can find the money for that in WHATEVER circumstances there are, then by God we can find the money for THIS. FUNDING. YES that means higher taxes. But we can find the money THERE, TOO. I'd take that one straight to the koch brothers and adelson and the rest of 'em. And Bill Gates and Steven Spielberg and Warren Buffet and George Soros and every last one of the Wall Streeters and banisters and tell them THEIR freedom isn't free either. THEY HAVE TO COUGH IT UP, TOO. If the koch brothers, alone, are each worth some 40+ BILLION dollars, how 'bout they each cough up one of those billions? So they'd each be worth 39+ BILLION dollars instead. Gee, what pain, what pain. Seems to me they could absorb that without even feeling it.

Seems to me all the shortcomings we've seen in the system can only be fixed by FUNDING. Not enough hospital supervision? Well, we're gonna HAVE TO hire and train more people. More sets of eyeballs on every nurse and doctor who puts on and takes off any of that protective gear. MORE case workers. MORE specialists and redundant systems in place to make double- and triple-sure. MORE equipment. MORE protective gear, and better protective gear. And MORE safe disposal arrangements. And all of that costs money. Every last bit of that costs money. And I'm sorry. But we need to spend that money. So we need to raise that money. That's funding we need! Because our lives depend on it.

Everything we have in place now is still basically insufficient to anticipate demand. And we heard in that hearing just now - people lie. People don't tell the truth. People won't always tell you where they traveled from. SO YOU NEED EXTRA PRECAUTIONS IN PLACE, which means EXTRA PEOPLE on hand to backstop and double-check and even triple-check. Which means you have to hire and train those extra people which means you have to spend more money. It's gonna cost more money. Sorry, but that's the - pardon the pun - bottom line.

We cannot meet this crisis or get a handle on it by doing the minimums and then hoping that takes care of it. We have to jump on it with full force! The nurse on TV now, points out - "they gave us an optional seminar to go to..." "OPTIONAL"? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???? SHEESH!!!!!!!!