Some cuts necessary, but not all make sense

The fears bubbling up from the government sector and from those funded by federal monies as across-the-board budget cuts loom over them after a deal was not reached on those cuts in Washington may be valid, but it’s surely difficult for those who operate in the private sector to feel too sorry about it all. It seems about time the government faced the fact that there’s a whole lot less money out there to play with, something that hit the rest of America squarely in the face about five years ago when the Great Recession hit. The Hartford Courant has quotes from our U.S. senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy at Tweed New Haven Airport Friday, March 1, about how the cuts (though not targeted at Tweed right now) could create long lines at airports, be catastrophic, are dumb and thoughtless and are part of a pattern of governing crisis to crisis. But those businesses that don’t benefit from federal money one way or another have had to make cuts in response to crisis over the course of the recession. Those cuts could not really always be thoughtful and well-placed in that they had to be done in order to make payroll week to week or pay the rent or mortgage, or of course taxes, month to month. In Connecticut, though, the combination of state budget cuts and the possible federal cuts associated with sequestration could be a double whammy for some parts of the economy, such as hospitals that are looking at getting hit from all sides if Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s budget goes through with its current proposed cuts to hospital funding. In the Northwest Corner, Sharon Hospital is especially at risk, its administrators say, in that it is a for-profit entity and has much higher expenses than the state’s nonprofit hospitals, including paying an array of taxes. Sharon Hospital has for 10 years been the only for-profit hospital in Connecticut (though that may soon change), having gone through the conversion from nonprofit when it was sold to Essent with much state oversight and public discussion in 2002. According to a guest commentary by Lakeville’s Rusty Chandler in this newspaper on Dec. 20, 2012, the merger of Sharon Hospital with RegionalCare made it the only hospital in the state that is debt-free. That, along with past layoffs and wage freezes that have been covered in this newspaper, would seem to put Sharon in a good position to deal with the economic challenges it now faces. Yet being hit especially by Malloy’s proposal has put not just Sharon, but all hospitals in the state, on the defensive. No budgets are going to please everyone, and the state budget has had to go through painful cuts during the recession. But until the public sector makes the same kind of sacrifices the private sector has had to make over the past years (such as salary cuts and layoffs, for instance, rather than just putting off cost-of-living increases for a bit), providers of critical services such as hospitals should not be the targets of unreasonable cuts. Malloy and the Legislature should take a careful look at their “crisis” cuts and be sure they aren’t punishing those in the state who have already suffered the most through the recession by making their access to healthcare even more difficult and expensive. If hospitals are forced to cut staff or even close due to a sudden lack of essential funding, that is just what could happen.