Regional Hospital

I'd like to share some thoughts on the hospital issue under debate. First, i am not that well informed about the situation here with Gritman & PMH, other than following the visionary chat. Rather, I'd like to share what i saw happening in the last community in which i lived, Redway/Garberville, CA. The two small towns of Redway and Garberville each had their own health care facility, and they went through three years of debate, focus groups and study over a merger.

The Redway facility, Redwoods Rural Health Care Center, was more of a large clinic, quite progressive, consisting of one side that included typical allopathic/Western medical care and one side that had a Naturopath, Chiropractor, Chinese Med/Acupuncturist, Massage, Counseling and Dentistry. There were two separate entrances though it was all one clinic. Redwoods Rural had an affinity for women's health care and there were mainly female practitioners except for the supervisory M.D.'s who were rarely seen. The Redwoods Rural clinic was relied on heavily by the very rural population who often lived "out in the hills" over distances travelled slowly over terrible roads. Garberville, just four miles away, was a larger town and had a hospital. Though its services were limited, we were grateful for the ER. If anyone needed real surgery or tests or even a C-section, everyone would always go north 80 miles to Eureka.

The same type of fear-based factors were evident, as the communities were told that both would fold if they did not bind together in today's ever growing monopolized health-care culture of managed care, etc. The result of the merger turned out to be that by privatizing the previously public Redwoods Rural and lumping it financially with the Garberville hospital under one governing board, it suddenly became an interesting commodity for the larger hospital corporations to swallow up. The Sisters of Orange bought it and suddenly began to impose their Catholic agenda, which included denying the focus of Redwoods Rural, which was largely to provide family planning and contraception. They also sought to prevent the RRHC practitioners from doing any counseling about abortion. The "natural therapies" side also had to fight to justify their patient turnover rates, judged as inefficient since those practitioners often spent at least 45 minutes with a client, as opposed to the Sisters of Orange goal of 12 minutes.

My view is along the lines of what Bill L. stated, that the mega-merger-monopoly trend has its pitfalls. While I realize the Pullman/Mosow situation is unique and distinct from the one I described, I support keeping control over healthcare as local as possible. Merging PMH and Gritman could result in their sale to an even larger hospital chain with even less understanding of our local needs. I like the idea of collaboration, with each facility maintaining specialties to reduce duplication of equipment.

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