Lincoln County Healthcare’s plan to shutter the emergency department at St. Andrews Hospital in Boothbay Harbor may make financial sense, but it doesn’t feel good.
In fact, it feels really bad. It sounds really bad, like someone is going to die, bad; as in this cold-hearted decision by some anonymous bean counter is going to wind up killing somebody because, without St. Andrews, the nearest emergency room to Boothbay Harbor is 20 minutes or more away.
If we are being honest, yes, in an absolute, worst-case scenario, the additional travel time could wind up killing someone. If and when that happens, the fact the numbers and therefore the odds are overwhelmingly against such a disaster happening to any one person will be little consolation to the loved ones left behind.
Still, if we are being honest, looking at Lincoln County Healthcare’s figures, we have to admit those numbers by themselves make a very compelling case.
Those numbers underscore the fact that medical care is cost prohibitive; that emergency room care is the most expensive item on a very expensive menu; that day in and day out, St Andrews’ ER is an underutilized resource; that most cases there are transported to another hospital, one that has the staff and the resources on site to deal with whatever crisis comes through the door the second it comes through the door.
If we are being honest, as a straight up business decision, keeping an ER going in Boothbay Harbor isn’t justified by the expense.
Still, it doesn’t help when the message, the perfectly reasonable “we have to cut costs,” feels like a seriously unreasonable insult to an entire community: “You don’t rate your own hospital anymore. You rate a health center.”
No wonder our neighbors on the Boothbay peninsula are upset. Who wouldn’t be, to hear such news?
We hate to say it, but based on the glum pronouncements by Lincoln County Healthcare officials in our front page story this week, it could even get worse. If the needs continue to rise, and the money continues to fall, it definitely will get worse.
Lincoln County Healthcare and its parent MaineHealth are non-profit businesses, but they are businesses nonetheless.
In the big picture, the decision to close St. Andrews’ ER is born of the necessity of working with a broken system. The bottom line is, across the board, it currently costs more to treat people than the system is taking in.
There are many problems with our healthcare system: junk food, obesity, inactivity, the influence of pharmaceutical and insurance companies, the growing lack of general practice doctors and political shell games to name a few.
The inequities in the cost of doing business is just the rot at the center of the tree.
