That is by design. CDC was always intended to be a coordinating agency as well as performing some research functions. A true epidemic is going to be beyond the capabilities of any one government agency anyway. CDC will coordinate the response of the elements already on the ground to respond to the threat as well as providing information and (I believe) advisers to the local responding elements. CDC does that pretty well as far as I know. The real inherent weakness in the system is just like in MI, the sensors. For the system to work, the sensor (doctor, nurse, health care professional etc.) has to a) recognize that there is something that needs to be reported and b) actually report it. Easier said than done. The only way to get around that would be to place someone in each hospital, clinic etc. to report to the CDC. That's not an especially practical solution. Again, more government bureaucracy is not the answer.
Nah, TRI-CARE isn't really any better or worse than an average HMO and in fact Tri-West is a subsidiary of Blue Cross/Blue Shield (a fact they don't seem to advertise ).
It is also an issue of all the times that wolf has been cried over the years. In the eighties, AIDs was going to kill us all, then it was Ebola, then Mad Cow disease, then SARs and most recently (my personal favorite) H5N1 bird flu. All of these were going to kill us all and none really lived up to the hype. I am a medic. I know that there is some nasty stuff out there waiting for the chance to give us a nasty death (other than tofu, I mean, which is a work of pure culinary Evil) but the hysteria around the "epidemics" that I mentioned mixed with all the other stuff than is going to kill us (plastics, cholesterol, well bad cholesterol or not enough good cholesterol or too many triglycerides, or eggs, no wait a minutes eggs are good for you, no wait they're bad again, no they're good, no bad and so on) have led to a significant amount of apathy on the part of John Q. Public and if John doesn't really care about it then the politicians aren't going to pretend to care either.
SFC W
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