Forum woes raise questions

Forum woes raise questions
EDITOR:
A recent Vindicator article argued for greater community involvement in the planned reorganization of Forum Health by its outside management team. Indeed, it cannot be argued too strongly that Forum's woes ought to receive much more energetic attention from area political leaders. Forum Health, and the more general distribution of health care throughout the Valley, is a house built by government.
Taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid provide much of Forum's revenue. Revenue from commercial health insurers is drawn largely from employer-paid premiums that inexplicably remained tax-exempt when Medicare was signed into law in 1965. That meant even more money available for health care consumption than if employer-paid health premiums had been taxed as ordinary income.
Shunned by government-licensed physicians, and unable to buy DEA-scheduled drugs from government-licensed pharmacists on their own counsel, even "medically uninsured" taxpayers contribute to a Medicare risk pool from which they don't directly benefit at all. Likewise, "medically uninsured" workers pay a disproportionately high effective tax rate to make up for the taxes not paid by workers who receive employer-paid, tax exempt commercial health insurance benefits as part of their compensation. Forum Health rests at the intersection of these and numerous other government interventions in medical business.
Should Forum's management direct there be major permanent layoffs and a liquidation of physical assets, the hospital system's reorganization may have ripple effects similar on a smaller scale to those of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube collapse 30 years ago. Elected officials and community stakeholders are well within their rights to exercise strong leadership and examine the direction Forum Health is being led by its consultants.
Now may be a good time to revisit a touchstone question that has never been satisfactorily answered within our health care system. Who should get health care, who should be denied health care, and why?
JACK LABUSCH
Niles
Scalia should recuse himself
EDITOR:
Thank you for your very articulate editorial of March 31 concerning Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's recent speech in Switzerland regarding the case now pending in the Supreme Court involving the legal rights of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
Regardless of one's view as to the merits of this issue, I think it is always extremely inappropriate for a judge to comment publicly on the merits of an issue when the judge knows that he or she will be called upon to decide that issue in a pending case. As your editorial noted, while Justice Scalia is not obligated to recuse himself from this case, now that he has commented publicly upon it, the appearance of impropriety that his comments has raised can now only be removed if he in fact does recuse himself.
Unfortunately, there is no indication that Justice Scalia will "do the right thing" and re-think his intention to participate in the resolution of this case, even in the face of what I imagine to be widespread national chagrin in the wake of his remarks. Regardless of the legal outcome of this case, Justice Scalia's willful blindness to his obvious lack of judicial neutrality in this instance is a sorry blot upon the American system of justice, which I fear the rest of the world will not fail to note. Americans deserve better than this from the justices of the highest court in our land.
Atty. JAN MOSTOV
Youngstown