I know there’s never really a good time to say I told you so.
So, he knows a thing or two about dealing with epidemics.
Ehrman’s larger point is that we’d be in better shape to battle this disease if we hadn’t been dismantling our public health system going back to the Reagan years of the 1980s. And he says we should immediately undo those cuts by hiring more public scientists, nurses, doctors, social workers, and so forth.
Coincidentally, I watched the debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders a few days after my conversation with Ehrman.
Sanders wants to use the coronavirus scare as a spur to create a health-care system in which all people—even the poor and middle class—have access to medical coverage, so that the prohibitive cost of a test will never deter someone from taking it.
It’s sort of a localized version of the Biden/Sanders health-care debate.
