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A Decade of Tireless Service
By Walton Green, Sharon
Having had considerable interest in the tragic demise of Winsted Hospital under the aegis of James Sok and Donald Dombal—questionably employed as they were by both Winsted and Sharon Hospitals—I took more than passing note of Judy Pavlak's letter about Community Lawyer Charlene LaVoie [Our Community Lawyer, March 22].
Many of us in the Sharon Hospital area have come to feel that Winsted Hospital's sudden and all-but unexplainable fiscal decline, originally supposed to be rescued by Sok and Dombal's infamous "vision plan," was actually a personally profitable privatization scheme. It was also arguably their dry-run for a similar plan to be implemented later at Sharon Hospital. This plan was arrested mid-flight by Sok's timely cashiering by the Sharon Hospital physicians.
Despite the departure of Sok and Dombal, the groundwork for fiscal shenanigans in Sharon had already been laid by their disastrously expensive building expansion and their perhaps purposeful neglect of the responsibilities of fiscal housekeeping. It is more than a little ironic that Essent Healthcare Corporation is now attempting to step into the Sok/ Dombal shoes, and boasts of plans to reap astronomical financial rewards from ownership of Sharon Hospital.
It is to Ms. LaVoie's enormous credit, as attested in the first half of Ms. Pavlak's letter, as well as to that of the Nader Foundation, that she was legally sophisticated enough and fearless enough to stop the Sharon/ Sok juggernaut in Winsted, and then go on to organize damage control and the remediation that today takes the form of the Winsted Health Center. In Sharon, despite occasional legal advice we keenly sought from Ms. LaVoie, we have not been nearly so lucky.
I suggest that the for-profit conversion of Sharon Hospital is only the first of many—and that when other community hospitals, such as Charlotte Hungerford, face this process, citizens will realize that it is everyone's concern. Ms. LaVoie obviously understands that the hospital conversion law will impact health care for all citizens, including in Winsted. It is this foresight that inspired her to donate her time to help us organize and focus attention on the proposed sale of Sharon Hospital. But, as the founder of the citizen effort to keep Sharon Hospital community-supported and not-for-profit, I am in a position to inform Ms. Pavlak that her characterization of Ms. LaVoie's participation in our effort as "deeply involved" is, to our regret, a gross exaggeration—and does disservice to LaVoie's dedication to the greater Winsted area during more than a decade of tireless (and occasionally, as now, thankless) service.
Tyranny? Let's stop being paranoid, Judy.
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