A bill that would drastically change post-retirement health insurance benefits for municipal employees is making its way through the state house and has caused a small stir among Island town employees.
For the past 10 years, Dr. Raymond (Rocco) Monto’s morning commute has been out of the ordinary.
Three times a week the orthopedic surgeon, one of just two on Martha’s Vineyard and the only one on Nantucket, drops off youngest son Rocco at school while daughter Siena boards a bus to Nantucket Elementary (older sons Alex and Nick are at Cape Cod Academy and the University of Connecticut, respectively).
With a long wait for on-Island health care in the past — though some frustration lingers — Island veterans and Providence VA Medical Center representatives met Wednesday night to discuss the sometimes complicated details of the new contract between the Providence VA and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.
The Providence VA Medical Center has awarded a contract to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to provide basic medical care for veterans, one of the last steps in restoring on-Island health care access for Vineyard veterans.
We ordinarily associate fire with devastation, a barely controllable force that overtakes everything in its path. The metaphor is used throughout Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke’s Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare, which screened before a sold-out crowd of over 300 people Wednesday night at the Chilmark Community Center. The showing was followed by two lengthy discussion sessions nearly the duration of the film itself (the documentary is 95 minutes long).
A new contract between the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and the Veterans Administration to allow on-Island health care for veterans is under final review, the Chilmark selectmen learned on Tuesday night.
Vineyard veterans have had no access to primary care on the Vineyard since a previous contract expired several years ago.
In a letter sent to the Chilmark selectmen on August 15 Vincent Ng, the director of the Providence Medical Center where many Island veterans have had to travel for care, reported the good news.
I spent the first 12 years of my medical career taking care of poor people in a teaching hospital in Providence, R.I. In the early 1990s health care was rather different than it is now. If a person had private insurance, they generally had ready access to both primary care doctors and specialists. For my clinic patients, it was another matter. Many had no insurance or Medicaid, were disabled, homeless, poorly educated or didn’t speak English. Working there required tremendous patience and a level of dogged determination that I did not realize I possessed.
After years without a contract for on-Island medical care for veterans, officials are reporting that “considerable progress” has been made, news that was met with skepticism by the Island veterans agent.
The original contract between the Providence VA Medical Center and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital lapsed several years ago, and in the meantime, Island veterans have had to go off-Island for most medical care.
Just like the rest of America, health care on Martha’s Vineyard is in trouble — too often fragmented, unsafe, variable, hard to access and far too costly. Poor system designs are the cause, designs sustained by a fee-for-service payment system that pays for volume (how much you do), not value (how well the patient does). Doctors, nurses, other clinicians, staff, and managers do their very best to help, but they are often fighting upstream against systems that make their work harder.
If the Island wants better health care, its citizens must demand it.
This simple but straightforward directive was one of the chief
messages of the second annual public symposium, Changing Our Health
Care: Options for the Vineyard, held Sunday night at the Performing Arts
Center.
