Answer the following short answer questions:

1. Provide real life examples of how the role of local health departments might have changed or after COVID-19 in the United States. What happened to the role of the local health commissioner, the budget of local health departments (how much were the local health department relying on their own revenue source and state or federal aid) and the type of public health services provided by local health departments?

2. In the city of Hartford, St.Abraham Hospital and Bluestate Hospital both have state-of-the-art radiology departments. Someone points out that there is probably more radiology equipment than would be justified by the size of the patient population in this small city. It is suggested that each hospital could specialize in one type of radiology. St. Abraham could do diagnostic radiology (used for diagnosis of variou sailments) and Bluestate could do therapeutic radiology (used for treatment of cancer). Each hospital would get rid of some equipment for which they currently pay monthly payments.

Suppose that the following estimates hold:

• St.Abraham hospital has profits of $20,000/month in radiology. If St.Abraham does only diagnostic radiology, it will maintain its current patients getting diagnostic services and also get Bluestate's patients needing diagnostic services, but lose all its therapeutic patients, resulting in profits of $16,000/month - but they will also save $3,000 in payments on equipment.
• Bluestatecurrently has profits of $25,000/month in radiology. If Bluestate instead does all of the therapeutic radiology, but no diagnostic, their profits rise to $29,000/month and they will save $2,000 in payments on equipment.

Now answer the following four questions.

Question 2A. If the two hospitals are asked to make this change without any additional compensation, what will each hospital want to do?

2B. If the hospitals are allowed to negotiate a deal with each other in order to make the change, is there any possible range of payments that could potentially result in mutual support for the plan (and if so, which hospital would pay and in what range)?

3. Is Question 2A or 2B more socially efficient and why?