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 ECMC Home:
Grannies & Gomers 4 Sale
One
of Joel Giambra’s greatest accomplishments was converting
Erie County Medical Center into a public benefit corporation.
A PBC is supposed to be “more flexible.” By privatizing
money making services and eliminating programs that
drain the public coffers, the ECMC PBC promised to lead
the County down a primrose path of financial security.
Clearly, we’re not on that path quite yet.
Maybe
the chaos surrounding the County budget made the recent
announcement of the closure of the Erie County Home,
which is run by ECMC, seem to be a result of financial
mismanagement. However, the reality is that programs
like the Home were put on the chopping block as soon
as ECMC became a PBC.
“The
things I’m doing will decrease ECMC’s reliance on the
county subsidy,” New ECMC CEO Michael Young told Buffalo
Business First earlier this year, “I hope to run the
hospital like a business. There’s no reason why you
can’t run a not-for-profit hospital like a business.”
Of
course, if you were in private business and found yourself
running the fourth largest nursing home in New York
State with clients who were in many cases indigent,
that wouldn’t be very good business, would it? Why the
hell should government be in the business of taking
care of people who are old, poor, or worse yet, victims
of severe head trauma? Many of these folks wound up
in the Home because no one else wanted them. How can
you make a profit off of people who are too incapacitated
to take care of themselves?
Perhaps
Tom DeLay could help supply his colleagues with the
answer: Terry Schiavo. Right-to-lifers loved the fearless
Delay when he summoned the Presidential Prayer Team
to deliver a miracle in the case of Schiavo. Of course,
the only miracle was that DeLay’s ethical charges took
a backseat for a week or two. Now that Schiavo has met
her eternal reward, perhaps DeLay would care to take
a trip up here to explain why it’s our moral obligation
as a society to prevent Schiavo from dying, while we
boot hundreds of seniors into the street in service
of the bottom line.
Taking
that business model one step further, maybe the County
could bid out County Home residents on Ebay. Maybe some
of the grannies over there still have enough needlework
skill left in them to be transferred to someplace like
Honduras. Maybe some of those head trauma victims could
be picked up for guinea pig duty by private contractors
in Iraq. How about taking out life insurance policies
on the old feebs before turning them out? Just because
you believe in the right to life doesn’t necessarily
mean that you believe life shouldn’t be filled with
misery and suffering. Like ECMC’s new CEO said, “There’s
no reason why you can’t run a not-for-profit hospital
like a business.” No reason whatsoever.
After
all, hospitals are too important to be left to the oversight
of medical doctors. Doctors fail to understand that
all of the liberal Hippocratic oath nonsense that they
were taught in medical school by their radical-activist
professors has nothing to do with the “real world,”
and “running it like a business.”
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