Allow me to ramble a bit........
I used to live in Geenfield, Massachusetts. Greenfield is the county seat for Fraklnin County, a somewhat back-water region of Massachusetts, and a couty simultaneously touching the southern borders of both New Hampshire and Vermont. There were once TWO hospitals in that couny: Franklin Medical Center (right in Greenfield) and Farren Memorial Hospital (just outside of Greenfield in the town of Montague).
About 15 years ago, Farren got closed down, shifting the full burden of medical care exclusively to Franklin, and reducing the number of hospital beds in the county by almost 50%. The reason given was that finanically speaking they didn't believe the current population of the county could support two hospitals according to today's business models for healthcare. I believe the old Farren hospital got converted into a medical office building with specialty care offices for outpatient kind of stuff.
Meanwhile if disaster ever struck, Franlin County would not be prepared due to the lack of beds. And if a neighboring county were to suffer disaster, Franklin County would not be able to help out very much -- again due to the lack of bed space. I realize we can set up makeshift hspitals in gymnasiums and civic centers, but the original "hospital movement" that started in this nation back at the close of the 19th century was a movement of benevolence in the face of ramapnt disease like dysentary, typhoid, small pox, cholera, and polio. The point of the hospital movement from that era was never to make money, it was to save lives. And having excess beds available is part of that commitment. (On a side note, our full commitment to engaging in the hospital movement on a natinal level successfully prepared us for the efficient set up and administration of the large scale and never-before-seen medical wards needed during WWI.)
I now live in Hamden County, on the Connecticut border. This is a much larger county, with more than three times as many people as Franklin. Here in Springfield (the county seat of Hampden County) we have Baystate Medical Center, and we also have a Catholic charity hospital called Mercy (a few lesser hositals are found here and there outside of Springfield yet still in our county). There used to be three other hospitals in this city including the Cooly Dickenson Hospital, and ALL of those hospitals were born of the hospital movement at the end of the 1800's. But those other hospitals all closed in the past 20 years. Mercy can barely hang on as it is financially. Meanwhile Baystate Medical has the ONLY "level 5 trauma center" in this whole region. The LifeLift choppers are constantly flying into Baystate Medical with patients from New Hampshire and Vermont because there is no other Level 5 Trauma Center for them to go to but Baystate (Boston, Hartford, and New York are the next-nearest).
As for Haiti, I do not know how many Florida Hospitals have been blessed with a Level 5 Trauma Center, but I do not doubt for a second that those Florida hospitals have indeed been filled to capacity as far as their ability to take level-5 trauma victims.
This business model of trying to operate "lean and mean" in order to maximize profits iis, in my opinion, totaly incompatiable with the point of medical care, the point of the hospital movement, and with the calling of being a doctor or a nurse. Having excess beds on hand is prerequisite for disaster preparedness.
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