Planners Short Change Health Care

Daily Observer

March 29, 1979

Doctors live in a world of heartrending and pitiable events, and contrary to media portrayal, spend their lives trying to do something about them. Somehow it is always 3 a.m. and winter in the heart of the hospital when a doctor and his patient confront the unknown together. No cheers resound in the bleak halls when a hard-fought victory is won, but the cry of failure is always amplified in the echo chambers of endless hospital corridors.

Doctors are very good at their jobs. Pros, they have organized their talents well in the care of the sick, and have contributed time and energies to amass technology, update methodology, and bring on-stream the latest arrangements that modernize diagnosis and treatment. The capability of the modern small peripheral hospitals outdistances by light-years the medical ability of the leading institutions of 20 years ago. Only those who dwell in the medical ambience can fully appreciate the import of that circumstance.

W physicians are amazed at the change in hospitals, the great increases in technical excellence that have been wrought during our lifetimes. We do not want to see these facilities curtailed; the methodology cut back, the capability restricted. We do not want to roll back the clock.

That is why some of us bridle when we read of the “plans” being concocted for our futures by the so-called Health Care planners, the Health System Agencies, the Health Planning Councils. It is the planners that have cut the corners of hospital construction, crimped the freedom to add new hospital beds, rejected bids for new nursing homes, and have carried on such an invective against “duplication” and the expenses involved, that patients have to be transported large distances for their studies that could readily have been performed at the home base.

It is the planner whose shortsightedness has caused the drastic shortage of hospital bed space that we are now experiencing. It is the planners who have prevented the marketplace from responding to the pressures of population and medical need. It is the planners who have confused medical care, health care, and preventive medicine. This same group that claims clairvoyance in medical matters road blocked additions at local hospitals. Right now there are no vacant hospital beds. .