So, a handful of people who sure look very much alike, just voted to turn our massive health network over to a bunch of people who don’t live here and who we have never met. They did so without community input, without an enforceable commitment with legal standing, and without any assurance that anything be better.
Do we know how many jobs will be lost to the largest employer in Lehigh Valley? Do we know whether those who will lose their jobs will get more than a few hours notice that their families’ ability to pay their bills might just have been compromised? Do we know whether there will be any outplacement services for these individuals?
Do we know what happens to the well over a billion dollars in cash reserves the hospital has accumulated over many decades?
Do we know how much of the massive real estate LVHN occupies will go back into the marketplace? Do we know what impact it will have on the rest of us who own properties in the region?
Do we know who will get services and who will not?
Over a career that spanned a few decades, I got to know most of the people in the region who call the shots. I don’t know who these people are on the hospital’s board of trustees but they work for companies I never heard of.
I doubt that any among them are poor. And I know from their photographs that none of them are black or Latino.
Do they care about our neighbors, about those we are too quick to leave behind? Did they spend any time consulting the rest of us?
Our news media, desperately understaffed with new, young reporters, not from the valley, didn’t ask these questions, didn’t demand answers.
Given the amount of government funding and private philanthropy that built that hospital, one would think that the hospital acquiring ours would have to answer such questions and, if the answers are unsatisfactory, make certain commitments before such a transaction of such a massive scale and impact could be approved.
When we allow this kind of thing to happen, each subsequent development becomes easier to push through, tougher for us to scrutinize and more difficult to stop.
As a people, we have to stop letting this happen to us. We have to get up off our knees, lift our proverbial fists in the air with more determination than the silly gesture made by the criminal running for president and insist on better. Our lives depend on it.