A similar thing happened here in the UK, we converted an exhibition centre (actually several in different cities) into Covid facilities. In the end we only used a few hundred beds and soon shut them down. What made the difference wasnt that we already had enough beds, but that other mitigating contingencies such as converting other smaller facilities into emergency hospitals happened fast enough, and moving patients out to less heavily hit areas softened the crunch more than anticipated.
I don't think preparing these extra facilities was a mistake at all. There are tons of unknowns and random variables in the progression of an epidemic, if we had needed those beds and din't have them more people would have died, possibly a lot of people. Complaining about waste is exactly like complaining about there being any empty beds in any hospital at any time. We plan for peak demand, including contingencies which may never come. It's like complaining that the military have any soldiers at all that never shot at an enemy, or bullets that never killed anyone. If we'd gone through the epidemic and there hadn't been any spare capacity, we'd used exactly as many beds as we had, that would have been bad preparation.
The line of thinking 'well there was a risk so any amount of money was worth it' - doesn't really hold.
People are rightly upset by 'mask gougers' why would they not in the face of 'hospital bed gougers' charging $500 000 / bed?
Resource utilization always matters, even in the face of life and death, costs have to be justifiable in the context of risk.
I agree that given unknowns, we have to err on one side, but there are and were ways to deal with such unknowns, for example, we have Spain, Italy, Korea etc. as guides.
It's also possible to 'stage' the creation of such projects without having to fully build them out, putting stages in places as necessary.
A 'million or 1/2 million dollars a bed' is utterly outrageous gouging, there's no rationalization for it whatsoever.
Where did I, or anyone else say 'any amount of money' or anything interpretable in that way?
There were credible scenarios, which could not have been discounted at the time, in which that capacity would have been needed. Spain set up emergency hospitals in convention centres, and a morgue in an ice rink. Those were exactly the model we prepared to follow in the UK.
As for the costs structure of the US model, frankly I have no idea. The NHS here works completely differently, suppliers do price gouge we're not immune to it, but that sort of thing can't really happen at the bed-provision level as that's an administrative rather than commercial issue.
A similar thing happened here in the UK, we converted an exhibition centre (actually several in different cities) into Covid facilities. In the end we only used a few hundred beds and soon shut them down. What made the difference wasnt that we already had enough beds, but that other mitigating contingencies such as converting other smaller facilities into emergency hospitals happened fast enough, and moving patients out to less heavily hit areas softened the crunch more than anticipated.
I don't think preparing these extra facilities was a mistake at all. There are tons of unknowns and random variables in the progression of an epidemic, if we had needed those beds and din't have them more people would have died, possibly a lot of people. Complaining about waste is exactly like complaining about there being any empty beds in any hospital at any time. We plan for peak demand, including contingencies which may never come. It's like complaining that the military have any soldiers at all that never shot at an enemy, or bullets that never killed anyone. If we'd gone through the epidemic and there hadn't been any spare capacity, we'd used exactly as many beds as we had, that would have been bad preparation.