It doesn’t take much searching to come up with dozens of examples of private companies stepping up to help provide our beleaguered medical professionals with desperately needed protective equipment and tools to save lives. Textile companies churning out face masks and protective clothing for doctors. Manufacturers switching their assembly lines to produce ventilators. Distilleries making hand sanitizer. Lots of companies are stepping up in other ways too, figuring out ways to serve their communities and protect their workforces as best they can, or diverting production to replenish items that panicked buyers have stripped store shelves of.

In just the past week, more than six million American workers applied for unemployment benefits as the United States entered another month of social distancing and quarantine in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy hemorrhaged more than 700,000 jobs in the month of March. The St. Louis Fed recently predicted that unemployment might hit 32 percent, greater than at the height of the Great Depression. These figures are dire.

Ten years have passed since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and the law has been more or less fully deployed for six.

The Senate gave final legislative approval Wednesday afternoon to the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Response Act and President Trump is expected to quickly sign it into law. But the cost of this bill pales in comparison to emergency economic assistance legislation that could cost $1 trillion or more.