[daveoc64]

Having enough excess capacity in healthcare systems to cope with potential future pandemics is too expensive. You'd need a lot more medical staff, plus more equipment and hospital bed capacity.

There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare.

Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years?

If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down.

Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.