Thank you to Bruce Pearson for his wise letter about The Everett Clinic, “Bigger is not always better,” regarding the Everett Clinic’s merger with the publicly traded DaVita Health Systems. His insightful assessment that it is not always the best choice to expand when it would, “do nothing to improve the level of care to patients” is a rational, experienced perspective.
Providing quality care vs. quantity of care is part of most health care organizations public mission. Yet it seems this very public mission is disappearing from health care on all fronts, including public health. We are allowing some public health programs to be outsourced to for-profit organizations. For example, the Snohomish Health District closed its immunization clinic over the summer, hoping that the under-served and most vulnerable will utilize the less nurturing Rite Aid pharmacy types. Since local governments are not investing in public health in substantial financial ways, we can only assume the future reality will be more programs farmed out to for-profit organizations, trusting that they will look out for the public good.
The people in our local health care organizations are hard working, compassionate people (that is why they chose their profession) but when their administrators are concerned about profits for shareholders, this is obviously a conflict of interest. Wish we had an actionable statement but I guess we just have to wait and see how this change evolves.
Teresa and Will Rugg
Snohomish
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