How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask
By BARC Staff | Date:
An article published today in the New York Times highlights the severe shortage of face masks in the United States during the COVID-19 epidemic, underscoring the need for a resiliency-oriented system that invests in redundancy, rather than a system built only with market-based efficiency in mind.
"The answer to why we’re running out of protective gear involves a very American set of capitalist pathologies — the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing, and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs," according to the article.
Read the full article here.