A disaster foretold: Shortages of ventilators and other medical supplies have long been warned about
WASHINGTON - Fear was growing in hospitals across the country in 2009 as a frightening epidemic that came to be called the H1N1 swine flu swept across the globe.
From Galveston, Texas, where a hospital ran out of test kits, to Loma Linda University Medical Center in San Bernardino, Calif., which had to set up tents to handle a crush of patients, to New York, where hospitals scrambled to bring on extra emergency staff, it appeared the nation's health care system would be overwhelmed.
The worst did not materialize. The lesson, though, was clear: The nation needed larger caches of standby medical supplies and hospitals that were better prepared to handle a surge of
