That headline isn’t the way Gov. Sununu would put it but that’s the essence of his letter to the Biden administration – here’s an IndepthNH story about it – in which he said the administration needs to “become the leader of this national issue rather than outsourcing the problem to one manufacturer.” In other words, the government needs to tell this industry what to do, because they can’t do it properly themselves.
The letter was spurred by shortage in IV (intravenous) fluids caused by the hurricane that hit North Carolina and destroyed the plant of Baxter International, which made many of the nation’s IV bags, a specialized product. This followed The result is that some surgeries have had to be delayed because you need enough IV fluids when dealing with blood loss during surgery.
IV bags have long been a problem; a similar shortage occurred in 2017 when a hurricane damaged makers of bags in Puerto Rico.
The underlying issue is that a free market can result in near-monopoly situations when economies of scale let a small number of companies drive out competition, which seems to be the case here. That creates a very brittle situation in which a localized disaster can cripple the entire country. The climate emergency is creating a lot of localized disasters these days, making it more important than ever not to have a brittle economy.
For industries that are important to our health and safety, it behooves the government to not let this happen. I don’t expect the Trump administration to agree.
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