Commissioner Heather Howard officially pulled the plug on Plainfield's Muhlenberg Hospital Tuesday afternoon.
Her letter to Solaris CEO John McGee is almost anticlimactic given that she tipped her hand months ago in pubic comments about 'saving JFK'. (I will post the letter when I get a working copy, the one received yesterday was unopenable.)
McGee wasted no time in announcing that MRMC would admit no patients after August 13 (was the press release already prepared, or am I too cynical?). This gives Solaris a two-week window for laying off employees, transferring equipment in broad daylight, and shutting down the physical facility.
In a final insult, Howard sticks it to Assemblyman Jerry Green, saying she is powerless to grant the only fig leaf that the Assemblyman was able to find in the whole business -- keeping the Muhlenberg license active for a period of time in order to search for a buyer.
So, without a serious and impartial examination of the alternatives by the State (one of which would have been to consider closing JFK as a more 'rational' and 'fair' move), 131 years of service to the greater Plainfield area is wiped out with a penstroke.
With the likelihood of an Obama presidency and a Democratic surge in both houses of Congress, one would hope that help is on the way. But it will be too late for Muhlenberg, if and when it comes.
With the help of Assemblyman Green's 'Plan B' task force, Solaris has done what it could to guard against being overwhelmed by Muhlenberg clients by attempting to disperse them far and wide.
The state, with its county-centric mindset, bureaucratically disregards the true geography of need and service, de facto making Trinitas (literally at the opposite end of the county) THE hospital for Union County's poor and uninsured.
Will it be 'genocide lite' as Deborah Dowe suggests? Or merely an inconvenience, alleviated by a free cab plan, as Solaris proposes?
Time will tell.
In the meantime, my mind's eye pictures Howard (as Macbeth, hands bloody after murdering Duncan), calling McGee (as Lady Macbeth, the instigator) on her cellphone, uttering Shakespeare's fateful line --
"I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a sound?" -- Act II, scene ii.Macbeth at least had the humanity to lose sleep over it.
Lady Macbeth was another matter.
-- Dan Damon
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