That HHS contract last September—the one to add to the national stockpile—gave Philips a year before it had to provide even one of the original, inexpensive ventilators and another two years to fulfill the entire order of 10,000. Despite the current emergency, "a Philips spokesman said the company has no plan to even begin production anytime this year." And they're getting no pressure whatsoever from the Trump administration to do so. No, just the opposite: "Instead, Philips is negotiating with a White House team led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build 43,000 more complex and expensive hospital ventilators for Americans stricken by the virus."

There's an army of people in their garages trying to hack ventilators out of scuba masks and CPAP machines and whatever they can scrounge at Home Depot to try to save lives, while this multinational corporation has a cheap ventilator—already paid for by the American public—that it is refusing to provide and the Trump administration refuses to make it do so.

A Phillips spokesman in Amsterdam told ProPublica that they had every right to profit off of American taxpayer dollars by selling the high-priced version of their ventilator to whoever would buy it. Here's what an HHS spokesperson had to say about that to ProPublica: “Keep in mind that companies are always free to develop other products based on technology developed in collaboration with the government. […] This approach often reduces development costs and ensures the product the government needs is available for many years." But when testifying to Congress about it, the story from HHS was entirely different: "This game-changing device, considered a pipedream [sic] just a few years ago, is now available at affordable prices to improve stockpiling and deployment," HHS said in a budget document. They lied.

Because it will always be profit over people for this administration, for all Republicans.