To the editor -- I challenge your April 20 editorial suggesting that Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital be allowed to join Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center in performing elective angioplasty.
Nationally, there is contention around hospitals like Memorial, without cardiac surgery programs, performing elective angioplasty. Few states recommend angioplasty without on-site surgical backup because of risk.
Washington state is re-evaluating the need for surgical backup. One rationale is that patients in rural areas may have difficulty accessing services. Because of proximity, access is not an issue in this Valley.
You assert that complications have decreased and backup is no longer necessary. Risk has dropped, but it still exists. I'm not willing to subject myself or a loved one to that probability. Emergency transport takes critical time.
You and others argue that hospitals should share in this "lucrative business." But as you note, duplication of services is not always best. Proliferation of highly specialized services can erode care. That's why there is support by legislators urging the Department of Health to protect existing cardiac programs in lesser populated areas like Yakima. Hospitals like Regional, which have invested millions of dollars developing comprehensive cardiac services, should not have to share revenues from less complicated, and therefore more profitable, procedures.
Dr. PAT OVERAND
Yakima
Boffo 'Bookbound'
To the editor -- Hurry and purchase your tickets to "Bookbound," the latest production at the Warehouse Theatre. Theater patrons are very fortunate to once again enjoy on stage three amazing Yakima actors: Kurt Labberton, Vance Jennings and Mary Kloster.
"Bookbound," written by local dentist and actor Labberton, is hilarious, brilliant and poignant. If you love books and the friendships of other readers, you will absolutely love this play. Don't delay: It ends this weekend! The last shows are today and Saturday.
"Bookbound" should be Broadway bound!
BONNY ALKOFER
Yakima
An empty bowl
To the editor -- The economy as a fish bowl: There is plenty of water for all the fish, unless it is being siphoned off by special interests.
Really big special interests are the Iraq war, oil companies, and other corporations profiting from the war. The Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org/WOWII/ says that the biggest recipient of war money is KBR, an offshoot of Vice President Cheney's company, Halliburton. These companies are like huge siphons taking water out of the bowl and leaving us fish in pretty low water.
Tell Washington to stop. We need a military to protect us, but we don't need to be spending $341,400,000 per day on the Iraq war. Go to www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home and watch the dollars tick off. Some, like I do, even think that we are still in Iraq to prove that President Bush was right when he started the war.
And how about if we make the gas companies and others like them pay taxes to fund the war that is benefiting them so much, instead of mortgaging our grandchildren's future? If we pay attention to where the money is going, there would be plenty of water in the bowl.
SUSAN ROBINSON
Yakima
The lust for power
To the editor — Nothing like the evening news or the morning paper to cause one to contemplate prayer.
Out of these, Lord — power-hungry old men, jealous of youth itself, wasting their naive young to feed nationalist lusts (if they are politically inclined), redressing ancient injustices at the hands of ignorant ancestors, friend or family or foe long dead, their hatreds immortal; or slaughtering entire forests for board feet only, ravaging whole mountains with steel and dynamite and cyanide for gold (if they be merely greedy), all that money for little pleasures and minor powers. Power for what?
Out of these ordinary elements of our common life, though some few have the energy to question it, can any discovery shine, or a phoenix rise? Will the simple search for truth, the clean pure love of beauty ever be our lives? For You are not human, nor a rememberer of sins, yet Your ways are all beautiful, uncaring, ceaseless: I have even seen decaying trees and common carrion shine softly in the dark, faint lovely light of life lost glowing through the stench of corruption.
Even this troublesome and decaying time that does evil in its dreams and lies just to hear its own voice, drunk with treacheries and cruelty, still thirsting for meaningless wealth, purposeless power, phosphorescent with little wars, flares like a torch. It has, I suppose, its own forlorn beauty and its echoes of barely discernible music rising to the pure and inhuman stars, jewelled incandescence in endless night, uncountably vast, all power and light.
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