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Company prioritizes $15k ventilators over cheaper model specified in contract:
The Dutch company that received millions of taxpayer dollars to develop an affordable ventilator for pandemics but never delivered them has struck a much more lucrative deal with the federal government to make 43,000 ventilators at four times the price.
The US Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday that it plans to pay Royal Philips N.V. $646.7 million for the new ventilators—paying more than $15,000 each. The first 2,500 units are to arrive before the end of May, HHS said, and the rest by the end of December.
Philips refused to say which model of ventilator the government was buying. But in response to questions from ProPublica, HHS officials said the government is purchasing the Trilogy EV300, the more expensive version of the ventilator that was developed with federal funds.
The deal is a striking departure from the federal contract Philips' Respironics division signed in September to produce 10,000 ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.
"This kind of profiteering—paying four times the negotiated price—is not only irresponsible to taxpayers but is particularly offensive when so many people are out of work," said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Obama administration. "And besides, most of these ventilators will come too late to make a difference in this pandemic. We'll then 'replenish' the stockpile at a ridiculously high price."
"What else," she asked, "won't we be able to buy as a result?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @02:25PM (2 children)
You make lack of experience sound like a bad thing. With a couple of exceptions, the Senators' "experience" is better described as corruption. They have no skin in the game for many of the issues that they're making policies on. Many of them are going to be dead before the consequences of some of these policies come true. And, even if they aren't dead, they'll be out of office and living in the lap of luxury.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @05:50PM (1 child)
The biggest selling point for the current US administration was this lack of experience and how it was going to "drain the swamp" and "shake things up". Well, a whole new level of swamp was dumped, and all the experience and expertise has been run off. We are certainly "shook up", and we're basically fucked over on SO many levels now.
Yes, experience really does count. REALLY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @10:16PM
You're confused, what we have here is called corruption. He selected people based purely upon loyalty to him and a willingness to do whatever he wants and then take the fall if it doesn't work out. He could have found experts whose experience matched what he wanted.
Without the corruption, a lot of this stuff could be done more effectively without automatically going with experience. Experience is why we have MRSA, experts keep pushing the abuse of antibiotics because in their world view, bacteria cause infections, so we need to get rid of bacteria in order to clear up the infection. And when they do that, they use antibiotics that wipe out entire ecosystems of bacteria. Shockingly, it has resulted in MRSA, but rather than admit that it's a fool's errand to try and use antibiotics the way they've been using them, they've doubled down on it.
In many cases, it makes far more sense to add benign and beneficial bacteria than it does to try and eliminate the harmful ones. And even when we do need to remove the harmful ones, it's foolish to use treatments that don't target that specific strain, rather than carpet bombing all of them.
We see the same thing with weight loss and nutrition, where the experts have no idea what they're talking about and you've got huge numbers of people that faithfully follow the advice they're being given and still are overweight.
Having experience can be really helpful, but you're a great fool if you don't see that it isn't automatically optimal.