Non-Profit? No Way!
There has been a controversy simmering for a few months in Rice Lake, WI.
The Community owned hospital was taken over by Marshfield Clinic. An ugly situation where Marshfield Clinic threatened to put the hospital out of business if they weren’t given the building and all other assets. It was not an idle threat. Many people (myself included) are angry. Very, very angry.
“The (Lakeview Medical Center) Board gave away our community hospital,” Rice Lake resident Dan Lawler said in a recent testimony before the city council. “Our question is, when do we stop giving?”
Earlier this year Lakeview, an independent hospital in this community of 8,000 in Northwest Wisconsin, affiliated with Marshfield Clinic,a statewide nonprofit healthcare network with nearly $1 billion in annual revenues. To Lawler and other local critics, the community gave away the hospital for free.
Marshfield Clinic plans to relocate Lakeview and build a new hospital a few miles from the current location, next to the new Marshfield Clinic building that opened this year on the outskirts of town near the intersection of Highways 48 and 53. Construction is set to begin in April and finish by fall 2010.
Since Wisconsin hospitals are exempt from property taxes, the community will foot the bill for fire and police protection, water and sewer, snowplowing and street maintenance.
“All other citizens in the community also pay for these same services, and I don’t have to remind you just how tough things are for these people in our community and others just like ours,” Lawler said.
“How many tax-exempt businesses can we afford? We need a tax base,” Rice Lake Mayor Dan Fitzgerald told BusinessNorth.
Bradley Bekkum, MD, Lakeview’s board chairman and Marshfield Clinic’s northwest division director, did not respond to BusinessNorth’s requests for an interview. Calls to Marshfield Clinic’s public relations office also were not returned for this story
The fact that Marshfield Clinic would not interview for the story tells volumes of their contempt for the customers they want to service.
We are not patients in need of care. We are cash cows. Very angry cash cows.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “Non-Profit? No Way!”
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Ranting about Non-profits … again « Local Politics 101 Says:
[...] Ranting about Non-profits … again A few days ago I talked about our former community hospital, now just another Marshfield Clinic profit driven money machine … http://localpolitics101.com/2009/01/13/non-profit-no-way/ [...]
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All publicity is good as long as they spell the name right? « The Academy of Local Politics Says:
[...] Regular readers of this blog know that I have no love for Marshfield Clinic. [...]
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January 13th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
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