Hospitals Seeking Settlement Money

* Re “Smoke Gets in Eyes of Tobacco Petition Signers,” April 13.

Since when is it the county’s responsibility to bail out a mismanaged private enterprise? The current pursuit of Community Memorial Hospital would have you believe it is.

Let me see if I have this right: If I sue my neighbor on the left and win, could my neighbor on the right seek a ballot initiative to exclude me from any of that settlement? It seems to me that’s exactly what they’re trying to pull! Fortunately, unlike Ventura County Medical Center, I don’t live in their neighborhood.

Perhaps if Community Memorial weren’t so quick to spend its not-for-profit funds to deceive the public with numerous full-page ads in the newspapers or unwelcome mass mailings--both with political rhetoric and misleading information--it could afford to provide health care for the uninsured and indigent of the county instead of turning them away to the public hospital across the street.

Perhaps the cunning people at Community Memorial believe they can fool the public once again. They managed to do it before!

PATRICK M. DUFFY

Ojai

* Of course Community Memorial and the three other private hospitals should get a share of the county’s tobacco settlement bundle--as soon as they produce documentation for all the decades of indigent care they provided to uninsured people with tobacco-related diseases. That’s what the county (health staff, accountants and attorneys) had to do to earn the settlement.

H.M. NACHENBERG

Ventura