Yes and no, some states are constantly on the border of being insolvent. California has a big 'rainy day fund' but this recession is projected to eat into a significant chunk of it. The way hospitals are funded and administered may make it tricky for a state to buy a bunch of ventilators with state funds and then donate them to a hospital... if you "lend" them then after the crisis the state owns a bunch of used ventilators it needs to offload.
Because the equipment requires very sensitive measurements on the order of tenths of cmH2O and tenth of a milliliter of air, a very small leak in any one of the seals can cause a significant inaccuracy in ventilation and especially in the alarms which govern whether the equipment isn’t overinflating your lungs. This isn’t like a car where you can just start it up periodically to keep seals lubricanted. You need to maintain them or to have a plan for how you’ll check them before putting them into service. And you need biomedical technicians who are trained to repair them and clean them. If you mothball the equipment there is a very real danger that without re-qualifying the equipment it will kill or injure patients.
The biggest effect GMs announcement seems to have had is convincing people that a car company that builds to PSI tolerances can build anything to the kind of tolerance needed to safely ventilate patients. I think this is a PR move and GM and Tesla will study the problem enough internally to determine they have no idea what they’re doing. Worst case we get ventilators from Tesla with the same manufacturing defects and quality issues which their cars have had. I personally would not feel safe on a Tesla or GM ventilator built without FDA oversight.
In some cases, it's complicated, yada yada. I'm certainly no expert on state-level budgeting in the US. In the case of NY specifically, I know it's been reported that Cuomo specifically asked the federal government for help getting ventilators and was rebuffed.
