Letters to the Editor - July 31, 2025

Call to reform Connecticut’s tax on hospitals

In reading the LVJ headline “Study says Medicaid cuts put Sharon Hospital at risk of possible closure,” I asked myself “How does our State decide to properly support community hospitals?”

Is it virtuous conduct by the hospital, lower rates, safer patients, higher civic responsibility? It seems all of these characterize Sharon Hospital in national ratings.

Regular readers of The Lakeville Journal may recall a story about the Lown Institute Annual Report of the most socially responsible hospitals in the nation, for 2025.

The Lown Institute is a legacy of Dr. Bernard Lown, an inventor of direct current defibrillators, a pioneering cardiologist, and also winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the group he co-founded, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

The Lown Institute studies social responsibility, with an index that measures the performance of hospital across the nation, on fair pay, community investment, the avoidance of unnecessary procedures and patient safety and satisfaction.

Out of 2717 acute care hospital examined, Sharon Hospital ranked eighth in the nation, and was ranked first in Connecticut. It turns out, however, that the problem (“risk of possible closure”) is not in our hospitals, but in ourselves. Fifteen years ago Connecticut began using a hospital tax to balance the state budget rather than support hospitals and patient care.

Recently State Senator Heather Somers (R-17) drew attention to this “rob Peter to pay Paul” strategy adopted by Connecticut and other states to augment Medicaid payments, and to use Medicaid

funds to balance the general fund budget. The future of these hospital taxes and their use to balance state budgets is now in question, by virtue of one of many sections of the “Big Beautiful Bill” cutting Medicaid expenditures.

Senator Somers wrote “For years, Connecticut used hospital tax revenue as a budget mechanism—drawing down federal dollars, then diverting the funds elsewhere. The result: consistent net losses for hospitals, which eventually led to a lawsuit and a 7-year settlement that ends in 2026.”

Government at the State and Federal level depends on patients with private health insurance making up the difference between Medicare and Medicaid rates and the cost of providing hospital care to all.

For more than 116 years, the community has helped to create a socially responsible institution, Sharon Hospital. The State has to do its job. We can bemoan the Federal actions, at least until the mid-term and Presidential elections, but Connecticut can also clean up its act—by reforming a hospital tax that places smaller and more rural hospitals at a disadvantage, especially when hospitals like Sharon are showing the way as leaders and responsible community citizens.

Deborah Moore

Sharon

Federal funding for libraries must continue

The Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, Connecticut, is the oldest free public library in the United States.

It started in 1771 when Richard Smith raised money to purchase two hundred books in London, which were put into the community collection where they could be borrowed and returned.

Today public libraries are the center of every community. Students without internet at home come after school to do their homework. People use the library to search for jobs and home rentals on their phones or library computers. There are many community events and classes offered.

In many libraries, volunteers help seniors with their taxes and teach computer skills. Authors come to talk about their books, and mothers and young children come for story time. And of course, there are books, magazines and eBooks to borrow, and if the library does not have a book, they can get one through the interlibrary loan.

Libraries are the dynamic center of every town, so why is this administration cutting funds for our public libraries?

The IMLS, or Institute of Museum and Library Services, was created in 1996 to distribute Congressionally approved funds to support our museums and libraries. The Trump administration wants to eliminate the IMLS.Already the proposed funding cuts have caused staff layoffs and more than 1,000 IMLS programs funded by federal grants have been targeted for elimination. This could affect access to the internet, eBooks, audiobooks and databases for research in our public libraries. The courts currently have halted the President’s plan to eliminate these services, but Trump is determined to make the cuts.

These are our treasured libraries, one in almost every town in America, and they are invaluable.

Library funding must continue.Contact your Congressional representatives to demand it.

Lizbeth Piel

Sharon

When President Trump wins, we the people lose

I’d like to suggest Mark Godburn is correct to argue in his July 17 letter to the editor that “Trump keeps winning” — just not in the way Godburn thinks.

At its essence, the Trump administration, to modify Lincoln’s turn of phrase, is a government “of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.” Since Jan. 20, Trump has been selling the American state for parts, firing masses of federal workers while destroying regulatory agencies designed to check the power of billionaires like himself. His cynically named Big Beautiful Bill will cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and throw as many as 17 million off of health insurance. It will gravely endanger rural healthcare, putting even the existence of our very own Sharon Hospital at risk (see Lakeville Journal cover story from July 17). And it will do all this for the sake of slashing the taxes of the very richest Americans. So yes, Trump is indeed winning — and over 99 per cent of the rest of us are losing.

Naturally, this sort of economic politics isn’t exactly popular. Unfortunately, however, Trump has had a fair amount of success distracting from his pro-billionaire agenda with grotesque spectacles of cruelty against migrants, which apparently resonate with certain Americans. But let’s not be fooled: the real problem facing us today is not migrants (it remains to be seen whether anyone will even want to immigrate to this country in a few years given the ongoing war on our quality of life). Rather, the real problem is a ruling class bent on sowing the seeds of hatred and division in its ever more rapacious pursuit of profit and those politicians — including plenty of Democrats — who are either of this class themselves or eager to do its bidding in exchange for millions in campaign donations.

Fortunately, there are stirrings of resistance. The most encouraging current example is the New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, who aims to address the cost-of-living crisis through policies such as rent freezes and free preschool. By proposing to fund this agenda through taxes on major corporations and the rich — not on “white neighborhoods,” as Godburn writes in tellingly racialized language — Mamdani has given us a blueprint for a politics that mobilizes the masses not through hatred but solidarity. This kind of politics spells genuine danger for Trump’s project. No wonder our billionaire-in-chief, true to his authoritarian tendencies, is now spreading lies about the immigration status of Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2018, and even threatening to deport him.

For the moment, Trump is winning. But he’s clearly scared, as he should be.

Adam Rashkoff Baltner

Lakeville

Thanks Sharon Hospital

I am an old man and yesterday I lost my balance and fell. My wife called 911.The ambulance arrived and the medical staff tended to me and took me on a stretcher to the Sharon Hospital. How fortunate we are to have a hospital staffed with such dedicated, skilled and caring people. They are a treasure. Thank you, thank you,thank you.

Harry Kramer

Lakeville