OPINION PIECE BY DALE L. BOHLING
Unless there is a momentous legal intervention in the scheming, conniving attempt by Sutter Health Corporation to steal Sutter Coast Hospital all Del Norte and Curry county residents will face an ongoing devastating community health crisis of huge proportions. And who is this calamity attributable to?
Insatiable greed of a corporation in these times is a near normal expectation, unfortunately. What is NOT acceptable is a sellout board of 7 local members of a community who for one reason or another find it perfectly acceptable to betray neighbors and friends, and yes, many strangers as well, by signing off our wonderful local hospital to a voracious money monster who has no other reason for existing other than sucking up taxpayer money by transferring local control to a far away board of mindless sycophants eager to downsize the hospital to qualify it for federal funding. Ah, yes, “federal funding,” the withering teat of a sick sow whose pus-like milk infects an already sick and dying society ….the bane of a healthy and vigorous society where free market principles not Keneysian economics are the better part of a dynamic and robust social engine.
This situation was made possible by the previous board’s decision to breathe life into the regionalization process and concomitantly dissolving itself into oblivion thereby absolving itself from the onus of betrayal. But they are remembered.
The succeeding board was overwhelmingly implored by a hopeful community to rescind the previous board’s decision but to no avail. Local Sutter Coast Hospital Boards seem to be infected by the same virus, be it susceptibility to intimidation (in whatever form) or the lure of 30 pieces of silver. Current Board members have been requested, cajoled and implored to make public their reason for refusing to rescind the vote of the previous Board allowing regionalization and dissolution of local control of our hospital but none has been forthcoming.
The bigger question of this obnoxious equation is why a community of Sutter Coast Hospital- dependent and potentially dependent citizens are willing to accept this betrayal by a puny little “board” of weak quavering little people that were either paid off or intimidated by the corporate monster. Their betrayal of an entire community is unacceptable. Many of you know who they are. Do you still count them as friends? Are they still your good neighbors? For most of us they are quavering , shivering little souls that hide in the shadows undeserving of community succor.
