By Ian White
The Daily News
Published February 27, 2009
In correspondence with
the newspaper during recent weeks, several people have referred to a
“health district” when discussing options for the future of the
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
What they should be
referring to is a “hospital district,” which is one part of the several
proposals being debated for the future funding of the medical branch.
Public confusion on
the matter seems rife; so much so that Thursday we published a letter
from one reader desperately seeking an answer to the question “Does the
county have a health district or not?”
Galveston County does
have a health district, which serves 13 member cities. Its Web site —
www.gchd.org — has information that tells how it runs the area’s 4Cs
clinics, operates emergency medical services and provides a variety of
community health and environmental health programs, such as breast
cancer screening, immunization, animal protection and inspections of
places where food is prepared and served.
Clearly, many of these
services are far from the responsibilities of a university school of
medicine and its associated hospital system.
But the medical branch
does need a taxing district, an area in which tax dollars would be
collected to help fund care it provides to underinsured patients, most
of whom come from this area.
That taxing district
could include several counties that, before Hurricane Ike at least, sent
their underinsured and indigent patients to the medical branch for
treatment.
At present, there is
not a hospital district, either exclusive to or including Galveston
County among others, in which taxes could be collected to help pay for
these much-needed services. It would require a favorable public election
to begin the process of creating such a hospital district.
As a committee of
University of Texas regents arrived in Galveston to hear the public
speak on the medical branch’s future, we wrote Feb. 20: “We support —
and we think the people of Galveston County will support — a hospital
district to help fund care for the uninsured and underinsured in this
area, so long as that care is available at a Galveston Island hospital.”
We are unshakable in
our support for the hospital district. We sincerely hope we can allay
public misunderstanding about the similarity of its name with that of an
altogether different governmental entity.
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