America's failure with this is partially structural, and part of it has to do with how geared the government is to support business interests. I'll allow some of that.
But at it's core, it's just a failure of governance, and decision making. If Obama were in power now, America would have a strong, and far more unified federal response to this. Would it be perfect? No, and of course it would still be massively complicated by the lack of any centralized healthcare system.
But it would be miles and miles better than whats going on now.
What's going on now lays bare what Trump is. He's a self promoter. He's got the brutish instinct necessary to win a certain kind of popularist election, within an electoral context that doesn't require most of America to find him remotely palatable, or even for the majority of Americans to vote for him.
What he doesn't have is any ability to lead, whatsoever. He doesn't want to problem solve, he just wants credit. He doesn't want to control competing visions for a solution, he just wants people in that will deliver sound bytes that won't lay the issue at his door. The only thing he leads, ever, is an effort to control his image, and how the news cycle covers him. That's it.
His only very limited successes came in an industry that is defined by deals, not by logistics. He's completely fucking bored of this shit, and has no ability to deal with it. And now, he has to be in front of a press that he's largely avoided in terms of answering questions, and there's a reality that he can't just keep denying, and a news story that isn't just being replaced by the next shiny thing. There's a problem, that needs fixing. There are millions of things that need distributing, and people have to figure out how best to do it, and who needs it, and deal with employers and private and public hospitals and this and that and zzzz.
And it's not unique to Obama, though I think his instinctive acceptance of expertise would be a huge advantage here. The fact that we currently have Trump in power is going to cost thousands of American lives, over virtually anyone else who has run for president in my memory, Republican or Democrat. He was an embarrassment, he was a joke, he was relatively lucky, and now he's a fucking tragedy.