ProHealth afraid of healthy competition (letter to the editor)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feb. 12, 2006

Laurel Walker misses the point.

In her column on Sunday, Laurel Walker essentially accuses Aurora Health Care of making much ado about nothing by pointing out that Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital was on emergency bed status for seven days during the month of January.

As a retired nurse (no, not with Aurora), I can attest that Walker is correct in pointing out that hospitals are usually more crowded during the winter months, and do occasionally resort to emergency bed status or some similar designation.

However, what Walker fails to point out is the one key difference that makes the situation at OMH so newsworthy: No other hospital system in this area opposes competition the way ProHealth does.

Walker states that Froedtert, Sinai and Elmbrook have all, on occasion, declared something similar to the emergency bed status used by ProHealth. But no one at Froedtert, Sinai or Elmbrook has ever run a multimillion-dollar campaign to prevent a competing health care organization from entering the market.

ProHealth Care, the system that runs OMH and Waukesha Memorial, has done that by repeatedly issuing statements suggesting that the proposed Aurora hospital is not needed because their hospital is never full. The truth, as we all know, is that their hospital is sometimes full.

By overlooking this critical difference, Walker makes it clear that she does not have even a basic understanding of the issue which she chose to write about. Your paper should demand more from its columnists.

Jan Metrusias
Town of Genesee