Co-oping with Daniel Freeman Hospital
by Sheila
Bernard
A strong community effort is
underway to save Daniel Freeman Hospital of the Marina.
Save Our Marina Hospital Coalition has obtained
an injunction which will stop the new owner of the hospital, Tenet Corporation,
from closing the hospital until some conditions are met. One condition is a
planning process to assess the possibility of keeping the hospital
open.
At a recent hearing at the Venice
High School auditorium, a Tenet executive said there were some possible ways the
hospital could be kept open, but he assumed it would be kept open under
Tenet’s ownership. Considering the behavior of Tenet prior to the
injunction, and considering corporate behavior in general in these days of Enron
and Worldcom, there is reason for skepticism regarding Tenet’s capacity
for running the hospital in the best interest of the public. A better
alternative would be a combination of cooperative, private, and public
ownership.
According to Tenet at
another hearing at the Boys and Girls Club, in the years leading up to the
bankruptcy of the hospital, the previous owners had a deficit of $55 million.
To be conservative, let’s assume it took two years to acquire that
deficit. Let’s assume also that the hospital serves about a quarter of a
million people, because according to the map provided by Tenet, Daniel Freeman
Hospital is the only hospital serving the entire 11th Council
District.
Balancing a budget deficit of
$55 million in two years would amount to less than $10 per month per person,
which could potentially come partly from membership dues, arranged on a sliding
scale, which could entitle members of the public to participate in
decision-making for the “Daniel Freeman Health Care Cooperative.”
The members could decide, for example, whether the cooperative should include a
holistic component, consisting of alternative treatments such as chiropractic,
acupuncture, etc. These alternative methods would attract other kinds of
foundation and private support. In addition, cooperative investment by doctors
and other professionals could supply part of the funding. UCLA, which has
offices across the street from the hospital, could be approached for
participation.
There are other health
care cooperatives which we could learn from. For example, Group Health Care of
Puget Sound can be found on the internet under ghc.org. There are also many
countries in which large segments of the health care industry are owned by the
public. While such a plan is being created, we would need the assistance of the
Attorney General to keep the facility functioning at an adequate
level.
The public sometimes acquires
property through “eminent domain,” in which the government pays the
owner of the property fair market value so the property can be used for a public
purpose. This option could also be explored as a means to remove the hospital
from the speculative market while a cooperative starts
up.
Creating a health care cooperative
would require a dedicated group of researchers and founders, and a public
willing to trust each other enough to go into business together for mutual
benefit. It would require a vision of democracy more profound than the ballot
box: a vision of economic democracy which is built one business at a time. As
hard and as slow as this might sound, it has been done by others, and we can do
it too.
Posted: Fri - November 1, 2002 at 06:33 PM