A municipal hospital?

To the editor:

“Kitsap could lose last hospital…” must have been a frightening local news story for some 90,000 people insured with United Healthcare. Fortunately, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and United Healthcare came to an agreement.

I joined Group Health in 1968, now Kaiser Permanente, and it never crossed my mind that I could actually lose access to VMFH facilities if the two would not come to an agreement.

I am also spoiled. I lived for 27 years in Europe and “free” education and healthcare was guaranteed to everybody. Free, of course means, paid for through taxes. Each community has one or several municipal hospitals where doctors and staff, like police and teachers, are municipal employees.

In the US, however, health care is a for-profit business with all of its problems described in the Bainbridge Island Review article. Fortunately, we have Medicare and Medicaid established in 1965 under President Johnson.

After Kaiser closed its clinic in Poulsbo, and having seen the long line of sick people at St. Michael Medical Center’s emergency room, I contacted a county commissioner to ask whether Kitsap County could build and manage a municipal hospital? Centrally located in Poulsbo? Maybe in cooperation with the private healthcare industry? Financed like a school district?

A crazy idea? Being a trailblazer, doing something unconventional, often starts out as a crazy idea. Archconservative Prince Otto von Bismarck started in 1883 a national healthcare system and old age pension in Germany.

James U. Behrend

Bainbridge