Financing Hospital Disaster Preparedness

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 436-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. De Lorenzo

AbstractDisaster preparedness and response have gained increased attention in the United States as a result of terrorism and disaster threats. However, funding of hospital preparedness, especially surge capacity, has lagged behind other preparedness priorities. Only a small portion of the money allocated for national preparedness is directed toward health care, and hospitals receive very little of that. Under current policy, virtually the entire funding stream for hospital preparedness comes from general tax revenues. Medical payers (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance) directly fund little, if any, of the current bill. Funding options to improve preparedness include increasing the current federal grants allocated to hospitals, using payer fees or a tax to sub- sidize preparedness, and financing other forms of expansion capability, such as mobile hospitals. Alternatively, the status quo of marginal preparedness can be maintained. In any event, achieving higher levels of preparedness likely will take the combined commitment of the hospital industry, public and private payers, and federal, state, and local governments. Ultimately, the costs of pre- paredness will be borne by the public in the form of taxes, higher healthcare costs, or through the acceptance of greater risk.

Government increasingly relies on nonprofit organizations to deliver public services, especially for human services. As such, human service nonprofits receive a substantial amount of revenue from government agencies via grants and contracts. Yet, times of crises result in greater demand for services, but often with fewer financial resources. As governments and nonprofits are tasked to do more with less, how does diversification within the government funding stream influence government-nonprofit funding relationships? More specifically, we ask: How do the number of different government partners and the type of government funder—federal, state, or local—influence whether nonprofits face alterations to government funding agreements? Drawing upon data from over 2,000 human service nonprofits in the United States, following the Great Recession, we find nonprofit organizations that only received funds from the federal government were less likely to experience funding alterations. This helps to illustrate the economic impact of the recession on state and local governments as well as the nonprofit organizations that partner with them.


2019 ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
David M. Struthers

This chapter examines the World War One period in which the federal, state, and local governments in the United States, in addition to non-state actors, created one of the most severe eras of political repression in United States history. The Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, changes to immigration law at the federal level, and state criminal syndicalism laws served as the legal basis for repression. The Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and other anarchists took different paths in this era. Some faced lengthy prison sentences, some went underground, while others crossed international borders to flee repression and continue organizing. This chapter examines the repression of radical movements and organizing continuities that sustained the movement into the 1920s.


1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troy D. Abel ◽  
J. Thomas Hennessey

Since 1970, much of state and local activity in environmental protection involved implementing or enforcing national mandates. Recent developments in the United States suggest that some subnational jurisdictions have taken and are taking significant steps to address local environmental problems within, and beyond, national mandates. This suggests that there may be opportunities for state and local governments to address emerging local environmental policy issues. With any opportunity to address emerging local environmental policy issues is the question, Can state and local governments effectively implement new strategies to address emerging environmental issues? This article examines two cases where state and local governments have taken and are taking a prominent role in addressing water quality problems. The cases, although different in time and focus, argue that state and local governments can, and have, provided leadership on such issues. Much of the early effort to push for national environmental mandates was based on the assumption that state and local governments were incapable of addressing the environmental challenges facing them. The two cases presented in this article suggest that more than national mandates are required to overcome local limits. Among the required components for successful state and local government efforts suggested by these cases are experimentation, innovative combinations of public and private organizations at the local and state levels, and flexible federal support for local action.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane A. Bullock, BA ◽  
George D. Haddow, MURP

Our nation continues to experience increased frequency and severity of weather disasters. All of these risks demand that we look at the current system and assess if this system, which is predicated on strong Federal leadership in partnership with State and local governments and which failed so visibly in Hurricane Katrina, needs to be rebuilt on a new model. We are suggesting a plan of action that, we believe, is practical, achievable, and will reduce the costs in lives, property, environmental and economic damage from future disasters. The next President is the only person who can make this happen.We suggest that the next President undertake the following steps: (1) move FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security; (2) appoint a FEMA Director, who is a trusted adviser to the President; (3) include the appointment of the FEMA Director in the first round of Presidential appointees to the Cabinet; (4) rebuild the Federal Response Plan; (5) remove the hazard mitigation and long-term recovery functions from FEMA; (6) invest $2.5 billion annually in hazard mitigation; (7) support community disaster resiliency efforts. The next President will have the opportunity to build the new partnership of Federal, State and local governments, voluntary agencies, nonprofits and the private sector that is needed to make our nation resilient. The question is will the next President take advantage of this opportunity?


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 483
Author(s):  
Jerome H. Kahan, BA, BS, MSEE

In the years after the 9/11 tragedy, the United States continues to face risks from all forms of major disasters, from potentially dangerous terrorist attacks to catastrophic acts of nature. Professionals in the fields of emergency management and homeland security have responsibilities for ensuring that all levels of government, urban areas and communities, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and individual citizens are prepared to deal with such hazards though actions that reduce risks to lives and property. Regrettably, the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's ability to deal with disasters is unnecessarily challenged by the absence of a common understanding on how these fields are related in the workforce and educational arenas. Complicating matters further is the fact that neither of these fields has developed agreed definitions. In many ways, homeland security and emergency management have come to represent two different worlds and cultures. These conditions can have a deleterious effect on preparedness planning for public and private stakeholders across the nation when coordinated responses among federal, state, and local activities are essential for dealing with consequential hazards. This article demonstrates that the fields of emergency management and homeland security share many responsibilities but are not identical in scope or skills. It argues that emergency management should be considered a critical subset of the far broader and more strategic field of homeland security. From analytically based conclusions, it recommends five steps that be taken to bring these fields closer together to benefit more from their synergist relationship as well as from their individual contributions.


1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Baber

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s federal, state, and local governments worked together to implement policies that expanded the nation's highway systems, encouraged suburban expansion, and funded wholesale clearance projects in so-called slum and depressed inner city areas. These policies created programs that directly affected African Americans in cities all over the United States by targeting older neighborhoods, eliminating affordable (though substandard) housing, dislocating families and extended networks, and replacing what existed with highway overpasses, widened city streets, massive sewer projects, parks, and public housing. The residents of the affected neighborhoods were not involved in the planning, much of which took place years before the programs were implemented, and their voices were not well represented at public hearings. Absentee land owners, who leased properties to African Americans, capitalized on Urban Renewal opportunities, selling their holdings or allowing them to be claimed by condemnation or eminent domain for "fair market values." Those who were displaced had few options for relocation and resettled in other areas where they could find affordable housing, creating new low-income neighborhoods where they were once again tenants of absentee landlords. Traditional services—beauty and barber shops, medical offices and other businesses—were dispersed and people found it harder to conduct business with their friends and neighbors. Streets were broken up by highways, and people without transportation could no longer walk to the traditional business areas. Consumer activity was dispersed to new areas in cities, weakening the African American business foundation and causing many businesses to fail.


1986 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-263
Author(s):  
R P Nathan

This paper is the introductory essay for a set of six papers in which a series of field network evaluation studies, conducted in the United States of America, on the effects of major changes in the grant-in-aid policies and programs of the national government are described. The studies, begun in 1972, focused on the effects of new grant programs on state and local governments and the services they provide. The five studies are of (1) the revenue sharing program, (2) the community development block grant program, (3) all federal grants-in-aid in eleven large cities in 1978, (4) the public service job-creation program, and (5) the cuts and changes in federal grant-in-aid program made under President Reagan. In this paper, the rationale, methodology, and history of these studies are described.


Plant Disease ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 98 (6) ◽  
pp. 708-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Stack ◽  
Richard M. Bostock ◽  
Raymond Hammerschmidt ◽  
Jeffrey B. Jones ◽  
Eileen Luke

The National Plant Diagnostic Network (NPDN) has developed into a critical component of the plant biosecurity infrastructure of the United States. The vision set forth in 2002 for a distributed but coordinated system of plant diagnostic laboratories at land grant universities and state departments of agriculture has been realized. NPDN, in concept and in practice, has become a model for cooperation among the public and private entities necessary to protect our natural and agricultural plant resources. Aggregated into five regional networks, NPDN laboratories upload diagnostic data records into a National Data Repository at Purdue University. By facilitating early detection and providing triage and surge support during plant disease outbreaks and arthropod pest infestations, NPDN has become an important partner among federal, state, and local plant protection agencies and with the industries that support plant protection.


1997 ◽  
Vol 1997 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-263
Author(s):  
Jim Staves ◽  
Jim Taylor

ABSTRACT The current approach to preparedness for oil and hazardous materials spills in the United States is a maze of federal, state, and local programs that often overlap. The National Response Team (NRT), in cooperation with the Region 6 Response Team (RRT), has developed a contingency plan format that simplifies existing federal regulatory requirements into a single integrated contingency plan (ICP). This format, which was developed by a working group chaired by the EPA Region 6, with representatives from government, industry, labor, and environmental groups, can be used as a model for cooperative projects involving the public and private sectors. The purpose of the ICP is to simplify emergency response plans at facilities. A facility using the ICP format would benefit from the reduced costs of maintaining and updating plans and from the simplified training for responders. Use of the ICP format should also reduce confusion about which plan to use during a response and should improve coordination between facilities and state and federal response agencies.


Author(s):  
Wesley Wehde ◽  
Matthew C Nowlin

Abstract Using survey data collected from residents of counties along the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, we use innovative compositional data analysis techniques to examine individuals’ assignment of responsibility for hurricane preparedness across federal, state, and local officials as well as among household residents and their community. We find that the public assigns limited responsibility for hurricane preparedness to governments. Rather, respondents, especially conservatives and those with low trust in government, view individuals themselves as responsible for preparedness. Our results emphasize the role of ideology and the individualistic culture of American politics. These results also have implications for scholars who study individual attribution responsibility in multi-level systems and who may assume that individuals will assign responsibility to one of the various levels of government; however, focusing on disaster preparation in particular, our study shows that a significant number of individuals may not assign responsibility to government at any level.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document