In community after community, the hospitals keep closing. In 2018, it was Northside Regional Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio.
In 2019, it was Ohio Valley Medical Center in Wheeling, West Virginia, along with East Ohio Regional Hospital across the river in Martins Ferry, Ohio. That November, St. Luke’s Medical Center, which had treated patients in Phoenix for more than a century, shut its doors.
In 2020, as the pandemic hit, it was one in Massachusetts and another in West Virginia. Followed by four more — in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas — over the next three years.
Other hospitals are teetering on the brink. In 2022, Conemaugh Nason Medical Center in Pennsylvania announced it was ending OB-GYN deliveries, leaving some mothers-to-be to travel almost an hour to give birth. Last year, Glenwood Regional Medical Center in Louisiana was ordered by the state to turn away patients because of inadequate supplies and staffing levels.
Privatization does work, it doesn’t benefit the common good.
We must advocate the opposite, normalise it as a topic of discussion: Nationalisation. Having the government re-acquire aspects of the common good that have previously been sold off.
After all, if these assets have benefited the private companies, then why can’t they benefit the public in some of the same ways.