When anything disrupts lives here in Northwest Arkansas and across the nation, sooner or later the discussion is going to get down to prices.
Covid-19 is a health crisis, though. It's threatening people's lives. It's killing thousands. Most of us have so far avoided becoming ill because of wise limitations we've placed on ourselves with the encouragement of public health leaders. But this aggressive disease has disrupted daily routines more than just about any event or circumstance a lot of us can remember.
What’s the point?
Federal lawmakers representing Arkansas should explore how the state lost out on ventilators when New York offered double the price.
For the most part, prices have remained a background issue. Yes, a few comments here and there about pretty inexpensive gas at a time when none of us have a chance to travel. And jokes, certainly, about the value of toilet paper. One of our reporters shared his experience of ordering takeout from a local restaurant and discovering that for any order over $20, the restaurant included a free roll of toilet paper with the order.
Thankfully, the "we're all in this together" attitude has so far extended to pricing, with few reports of higher prices related to the crisis. But in every circumstance that stokes concerns -- some might say fears -- there are people who specialize in trying to make a buck through trickery, dishonesty or sly use of half-truths.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, whose office is responsible for consumer protection within the state, spoke at one of the governor's daily covid-19 press conferences a few days back warning people that increasing prices more than 10 percent in the midst of this turmoil violates state law. She's also put together some television commercials with emphatic advisories of the practice's pitfalls.
Rutledge's office reports receiving hundreds of complaints, but only a couple dozen merited further invest-
igation, according to Rutledge.
We're glad the attorney general is on watch.
More impressive than pursuing someone who got an extra $1 per roll of toilet paper, though, would be an aggressive response to companies that do damage to the state's covid-19 health care response.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has marshaled millions of tax dollars to help state government respond to the pandemic, lamented just the other day a poor outcome in the state's pursuit of additional respirators.
On the final day of March, the CEO of the University of Arkansas For Medical Sciences, Steppe Mette, said Arkansas had lost an order for 500 ventilators from an overseas manufacturer after the state of New York learned about it.
According to coverage in this paper, Mette said New York offered double the $19,000 per ventilator that Arkansas had agreed to pay, and put in an order for 10,000 of them.
That's the environment these days, Mette said. Hutchinson called the situation "frustrating and not how we traditionally do business."
Frustrating is putting it mildly. Arkansas has somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 ventilators, most of which are not yet in use. But the particular symptoms of covid-19 make it likely Arkansas will need more.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has complained that prices for ventilators are rising dramatically as competition for them grows among the states and other countries. He says it doesn't fit the legal definition of price gouging, but just reflects private-market competition.
We don't get the explanation. Have the costs for materials and labor to build ventilators skyrocketed within the last two weeks? Or are companies just making massively larger profits on each unit sold?
To be sure, Arkansas should not be losing out on its 500-ventilator order just because New York swooped in with more money to spend and more ventilators in its order. That kind of economic trickery isn't just about money; lives are at stake. And last time we checked, the life of an Arkansan was every bit as valuable as the life of a New Yorker.
We can't help thinking this is exactly the kind of circumstance a robust federal response could help prevent. The competition among the 50 states is partly responsible for the steeply increased pricing. Shouldn't we be competing as one United States rather than 50 individual states?
Granted, if the feds were more directly in charge of this, Arkansas very well might lose out on ventilator allocations as well. We're not sure we trust this administration to be entirely fair about how things get doled out. But if there's a time the power of the federal government ought to provide some benefit to the states, it seems this should be it.
We hope our federal delegation of representatives and senators are paying attention.
Commentary on 04/03/2020