Two stories, one problem

Local people who don’t have health insurance — or enough health insurance — need all the help they can get.

The problems those people face didn’t suddenly appear when Dan River Inc. shut down or when the formerly nonprofit Danville Regional Medical Center was sold to a publicly traded hospital company.

The Dan River Region has struggled to help the uninsured and underinsured for a long time. Despite recent local job gains, we still have one of the highest unemployment rates in Virginia — and most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employers.

One hometown solution to the problem is Piedmont Access To Health Services, started in 2001 to help people who didn’t have enough health insurance. Its work complements the Free Clinic of Danville, which helps people who don’t have any health insurance.

But over the summer, PATHS learned that Danville Regional Medical Center had indefinitely suspended the services it provided to the group and its patients. Apparently, the concern along South Main Street was that the work of PATHS and the Free Clinic would somehow overlap.

“We realized that (Danville Regional) held a number of contracts with the PATHS organization,” said Leslie Smith, director of marketing and community relations for Danville Regional. “To offer an improved level of service to our community, we felt that we needed to review and consolidate all of our agreements.”

Fortunately, that process has started and Smith said Wednesday that the hospital hopes to meet with PATHS soon. “We want to resolve this matter in a way that really benefits the community,” Smith added.

But Smith declined to say more about the recent firing of Dr. Phillip Hale, who treated low-income patients while working at Danville Regional’s Family Healthcare Center on Piney Forest Road.

“I wish I could say I understand it,” Hale said last week. “It seems to be driven by (the hospital’s) bottom line mentality without really looking at the big picture.”

That big picture, from Hale’s perspective, is that preventative care helps people avoid more costly, dangerous and deadly changes in their conditions. It’s a common sense attitude.

“If I took care of their blood pressure and sugar, they wouldn’t be going to the emergency room,” Hale said. “They wouldn’t be getting sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. When we do that, the hospital actually loses more money.”

Since Danville Regional won’t comment further on Hale’s case, that’s where his firing stands.

The efforts to help those with limited health insurance or no coverage at all remains one of the most important and critical health care issues facing the Dan River Region.

If Danville Regional’s corporate owners didn’t realize that when they bought the hospital in 2005, they know that now. That’s why the situation with PATHS and the firing of Dr. Hale are such curious and unsettling events.