I agree that it would make a certain amount of sense to have a facility such you describe. And I applaud your willingness to help fund it. But the reality is that you are in a minority.
Let's look at a more "every day" example of what I mean: there was a time when military hospitals set aside entire wings and were staffed to be ready to receive casualties of war... something that rears its head with alarming regularity. But this admittedly expensive practice has been deemed wasteful and inefficient. So now military health care personnel are being downsized, and many of those "extra beds" have disappeared, even though we still go to war, and we still incur casualties. So my point is this: if we are unwilling to fund a solution to a well-known and frequently recurring situation...war casualties... something as rare and "science fictiony" as a serious infectious disease outbreak simply doesn't stand a chance.
Your comment about there being so few hospitals capable of dealing with something like Ebola intrigues me. I'm unsure where you were going with that thought, but it raises some interesting points about hospitals in the US:
[From the
Becker Hospital Review, using 2013 AHA Statistics]
1. There are 5,724 hospitals in the U.S., according to the American Hospital Association.
2. Of these, 2,903 hospitals are nonprofit and 1,025 are for-profit. Additionally, 1,045 are owned by state or local (county, hospital district) government entities.
3. Of all hospitals in the U.S., 1,984, or 35 percent, serve rural communities and are considered rural hospitals.
Given this structure... note that no federal hospitals are listed (as far as I know, military hospitals are the only ones that fall under federal jurisdiction)... who can foot the bill for a hospital that spends most of its time in standby mode? The for-profit hospitals sure won't do it unless someone pays them for it. The non-profits sure can't do it on a large scale, even if they wanted to. And all those rural hospitals, most of which have little or no budgetary flexibility, can't do it either. The ones that do have the needed capabilities tend to be academic hospitals with significant research activities, or hospitals that specialize in infectious disease (and aren't of those!)
Personally, I think that a federally funded hospital makes the most sense. But try to get that idea past the fiscal conservatives!