The report that St. Johnsbury’s Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital is cutting staff and programs continues a dangerous trend across the state. Services that the community needs, like obstetrics and in-patient psychiatric care, get closed because we don’t finance hospitals based on community needs and with public financing. So they end programs that are “unprofitable” regardless of how necessary they are to the community.
It’s what happens when the healthcare “system” is really just a bunch of discrete units. Each hospital, each medical practice, each insurer has its own financial concerns in order to continue operating. The financial concerns outweigh any obligation to the people in the community. And there’s simply no entity empowered to ensure that the needs of the community are met.
This is no way to run a health care system.
Lee Russ, Bennington