Forum employee is proud to be a member of the group

Forum employee is proud
to be a member of the group

EDITOR:

I am writing to share a story with our community regarding the dedicated employees at Forum Health and how they step up to help one another. In the past several months, there has been much negative publicity about our health care system and its financial woes in the media. But what I see on a daily basis tells a very different story.

It has been very painful for all of us at Forum Health to work under conditions of our transition period of possible closure, bankruptcy and possible sale of our hospital system. Through it all, I continue to see wonderful, hardworking, self-sacrificing employees, down in the trenches, continuing to do the best job they can do. They are afraid and worried for their future, and yet continue to treat patients and each other with respect and dignity; from our inpatient areas, to our outpatient services (such as, the diabetic education program, and our new infusion center).

Most especially, on a personal note, the employees in the preservice area, where I work, have shown me so much kindness during a very difficult time in my life, that I want to share with them all the gratitude I have for their undying support. They are too many to mention each by name, but they are angels of mercy through and through.

So I ask this community and its leaders to help us fight to keep our much needed facilities open and viable, in whatever you can do. As you can see, I am nothing but proud to be a member of the Forum Health Team.

DONNA M. DETWILER, RN

North Lima

Universal health care for Ohio is DOA in Columbus

EDITOR:

Who killed the proposed Health Care for All Ohioans Act, a universal health care bill? The bill has slim chance of sparking meaningful debate and none at all of passage. What happened?

Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland had explicitly rejected universal health care in his gubernatorial bid last year, and kept his distance from the small number of organized HCfAO supporters. Republicans always oppose universal health. When a half-dozen impassioned HCfAO supporters recently testified before a joint field committee of the Ohio House and Senate, they were squeezed between a politically unfriendly governor and an unsympathetic Republican-dominated committee.

With HCfAO dead, Gov. Strickland is now free to enthusiastically meet with naive health care universalists statewide, while disingenuously blaming the Republicans for his own non-leadership on health care.

Yet, early in 2006, HCfAO seemed such a threat to opponents of good health care change that United Healthcare, a major health insurer, and the American Medical Association ran test ads in local television markets in anticipation of a battle royal over who gets health care, who gets denied health care, and why. Ohio Republicans and Democrats conspired to crush meaningful health care debate until as late as 2015, should Gov. Strickland garner a second term.

Ohio health care universalists are themselves to blame for not recognizing they had a multi-part agenda to sell. Can you blame political insiders and popular opinion for being suspicious of universal health care when it’s argued by elites who appear to have no interest in giving up their own tax-exempt, employer-paid health insurance?

What remains from the stillborn debate are our commercial health insurance contracts. Baffling to even well-educated folks, commercial health insurance is destined for a museum of economic laughingstocks and social oddities. Yet, we continue to be enslaved by them, because the American Medical Association stubbornly insists on these obsolete contracts to block universal health care, and maintain a political balance between the wealth of the third-party payer and the need to maintain a psychological feeling of autonomy of medical practice.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles