A second healthcare worker in Texas has tested positive for Ebola, officials said Wednesday. The head of the Centers for Disease Control late yesterday admitted the CDC "could have sent a more robust hospital infection control team and been more hands on with the hospital from day one about how this should be managed.”
Yahoo Finance’s Bianna Golodryga spoke with Congressman Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio and a member of the powerful House Appropriations and Budget Committees, about the Ebola outbreak and the U.S. response. Congressman Ryan says the United States has been "disinvesting" in critical areas, including healthcare and emergency preparedness for the last decade.
“We’ve been disinvesting in the NIH in the last ten years and the CDC for the last ten years. CDC’s been cut by $500 million in the last few years. NIH has been cut by $400 million in the last few years. And CDC’s money for preparedness is down $1 billion from 2003. So, now all of a sudden we have an issue. You know? We’ve had bridges collapse; we’re sicker than we used to be.”
Congressman Ryan says that's a notable change from the way the United States used to operate, and it can't continue on healthcare or other critical investment in American infrastructure.
“We can’t disinvest in the things that made us strong,” he said. “…post-World War II into the late eighties and into the nineties, we had things we invested in. We invested in research; we invested in technology; we invested in our roads and our bridges, our public infrastructure; we made sure college was affordable so that everyone can get it.”
The debate over the United States’ preparedness to handle an outbreak reached a fever pitch when the head of the National Institutes of Health said in an interview with the Huffington Post, "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready."
Some Republicans, for their part, counter that argument with claims of wasteful and inefficient government spending.
But Congressman Ryan believes there is a middle-ground solution to the debate over public versus private investment: compromise.
He believes there has been a mentality where it has to be either all private sector or all government and that has to change. “That’s a false choice,” he says. Ryan offers examples from his home state of Ohio, where successful development is based on a combined effort that uses public and private resources, but he acknowledges that those deals require a delicate balance.