Leavitt: We're overdue for a pandemic
Q: Secretary Leavitt, I'm Ronald Kahn from the Joslin Diabetes Center. And I appreciated very much your description, but one thing that has changed considerably between 1918 and the present time is also the health insurance agencies. So we have doctors and nurses and public health officials and the media and hospitals all trying to do emergency preparedness. But so many individuals depend on certain health plans which are hard to move around, hard to move the information around.
I wonder if you could comment how the health insurance and the health insurance provider group is being incorporated into the emergency preparedness thoughts.
LEAVITT: Well, the financial impact of a pandemic, the cascading consequences, if you will, of a pandemic are endless. Health insurance is one sector that you can begin to think about. There are many others.
Now, we have, through the Department of Treasury, begun to initiate those conversations. They have begun to initiate those conversations. It's like any other potential disaster; it's good planning to be thinking about that at the corporate level. And we are encouraging them to do that.
The reality is no government, whether it's a federal government or a national government or a local government, can anticipate every potential ramification of this. And that's why a prepared nation gets down to prepared individuals and prepared families and prepared businesses and prepared churches and prepared schools and prepared hospitals.
Surge capacity, ventilators is something that one needs to worry about in a situation like this. I had a – I read a comment by a very well thought of public health official who said what the federal government doesn't understand is that we count on the federal government for ventilators in times of nuclear events or biologic events or serious medical needs, and we would all be calling – what they don't seem to understand is we're all going to be focusing on the same stockpiles at the same time.
That's exactly what we do get. And the reason we're saying to local communities: If you don't have enough ventilators in your hospital, if you have insufficient capacity to respond in this kind of a situation, maybe you ought to be thinking about more ventilators instead of remodeling the swimming pool. Public health needs to be put onto the same budget platform as other community efforts and initiatives. I'm just suggesting that the health insurance industry is just one. Virtually every part of a community would be affected.
ZUCKERMAN: We have time for just about one more question, Mr. Secretary, if I may.
Q: (Unidentified – off mike) – from the NewsHour. You mentioned the importance of plans. And in recent days there have been news reports, and yesterday Dr. Nabarro referenced at the World Health Congress that the president's going to be coming out with a more comprehensive plan. Can you tell us what that will entail?
LEAVITT: Did you say the president?
Q: Yeah. He said that the White House is going to be putting out a –
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