Dear Editor,
Richard Dalton’s letter, “Gifford Medical Center cannot survive financially” raises some interesting questions about the way we deliver health care in Vermont and, for that matter, the rest of this sad and troubled nation. These go beyond whether Gifford can survive or not. Mr. Dalton summed it up perfectly: “the stark reality and hard facts come down to money and patient numbers.”
For far too long we have treated our health care as just another business transaction, a commodity exchanged for money that one party profits from. And as any business school will teach you, “profit is revenue minus expenses.”
In our version of health care, patients provide the revenue by way of premiums, taxes and out-of-pocket payments. But the care they receive is the primary expense. The less care provided, the greater the profit. At the same time, the attempt to minimize the expense of care leads to a mountain of administrative expenses.
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Our health care disaster is that we have turned health care into a numbers game. The question gurgling like molten lava beneath the “stark reality and hard facts” that “come down to money and patient numbers” is how long can we keep this numbers game going before it explodes? How many more disasters must we endure before we finally realize that health care is about humanity and should be treated as a public good?
I have lived through one volcano (Mt. St. Helens, 1980) so I well understand this metaphor to describe the health care times that we are in now.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier
