What noise down yonder pathway comes? Tis the piper come for payment.

It is time to pay the piper.

For the decades since the Great Recession, governments at all levels from the federal to the states and localities have cut public health funding almost out of existence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has had its budget whacked. In Maine, then-Governor Paul Le Page cut the state's health department nursing staff from 90 to less than 20. As Detroit neared bankruptcy, all of their health educators, the people who teach others how to be health-wise, were released. 100% of them. A former Oklahoma state representative, an emergency room doctor, said it is easier to cut public health than to cut personal benefits or access to care. 

 

And cut they did. While you might be inclined to blame the current Republicans for all this, there is plenty of blame to go around. This process of cut, cut, cut has happened under both Republican and Democrat administrations. Politicians cannot be accused of taking the long-view on something as seemingly benign as public health.

Until a pandemic shows up. One has.

Now the piper is demanding payment. A rapidly-increasing death toll is a cost of not being prepared, of being slow to react, and of misreading signs of a coronavirus against which not one person on Earth had immunity.

 

We have waited until the house is on fire to start interviewing firefighters. It is time to start thinking of mankind as one family living on this Earth. It is time to start thinking more long-term than we have. We need to prevent fires, not just put them out.