Closing of Tod is loss for community and its children

Closing of Tod is loss for community and its children
EDITOR:
It is with great sadness and disappointment that I read in The Vindicator of the closing of Tod Children's Hospital.
Many years of long hours and hard work had gone into making Tod recognized as the premiere pediatric referral center in the region with almost all of the pediatric subspecialties available locally. I say recognized by everyone but St. Elizabeth Hospital, which continued to refer patients to out of town hospitals. Dr. Rossi was quoted in The Vindicator as saying they hope to provide pediatric subspecialties locally, but she in the past did not use the ones that were available.
Do the residents of Youngstown know that as of Feb. 1 there is no pediatric emergency room in Youngstown? Pediatric emergencies have to be scheduled at St. Elizabeth between the hours of 1 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Recently, when a pediatric patient was referred to the ER at St. Elizabeth, the pediatrician was told to send the patient to Akron Children's Hospital in Akron because there were no pediatric services for the patient until after 1 p.m. Is this the kind of pediatric medical care we can expect from now on in Youngstown?
This is just another example of hospital administrators knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
WILFRED B. DODGSON, M.D., FAAP
Boardman
The writer worked at Tod until his retirement in 2001.
Improve training rather than reduce driving age
EDITOR:
I am a 15-year-old student at Jackson-Milton High School. I am writing because I am concerned that the lawmakers in Ohio want to change the driving age from 15 years old to 18 years old.
Peer pressure is a big reason for a lot of the accidents and speeding tickets. I feel the age for getting a license should stay the same. Driver training hours should be increased from 50 hours to at least 60 hours, to give more driving experience.
The hard stuff is the classroom work. Students do the minimum with the driving instructor. It ought to be equal with the classroom work. Young teens get into accidents on things that they can't learn about in the classroom. They should train the instructors better and require better and tougher driving routes so teens get better driving experience.
Besides increasing training hours, they should require more hours with parents. That's a big key to teaching and making a good driver. Parents don't step in enough and don't show teenagers the correct ways to drive.
Also, the test should be harder by having more hands-on driving.
The law limits young drivers to have only one passenger in the car for the first year, but the law is not being enforced enough.
THOMAS CARMINE SMITH
Warren
In government, less is more
EDITOR:
Politically I am a Libertarian and I am agonizing over starting my taxes for 2006. We Libertarians believe the main function of all government is to protect our freedoms. (I don't know what the Republicans and Democrats believe the function of the government is except to get bigger and bigger.) I am probably going to pay about 50 percent of my and my wife's income in some sort of tax.
This is a phenomenal amount of money to pay for the protection of freedoms that I was born with. The irony is that our government is sometimes the biggest usurper of our freedoms. For example, the federal government is 7 trillion in debt (a lot of it going to a war that we are never going to win). All our children and grandchildren are going to be saddled with this debt.
We need less intrusive government.
TIMOTHY McNEIL SR.
Mineral Ridge