During his election campaign, South Gyeongsang Province Governor Hong Joon-pyo promised two things: to be a governor who will work for underprivileged people, and to strive for the success of President Park Geun-hye.
His recent decision to close Jinju Medical Center (JMC), one of two public hospitals in the province, was a glaring breach of both pledges.
Governor Hong cites accumulated losses and militant unions as the two major reasons for shutting down the 103-year-old public healthcare provider. Unionists refute both points, noting that deficit operation is inevitable due to lower charges there, while pointing to frozen pay levels and back wages.
Both sides may be half right, which means they should talk more and reach a compromise instead of pushing for unilateral closure and physically obstructing it, as they are doing now. How the JMC issue will be resolved will set a precedent for 33 other similar institutions in the nation, only seven of which are not bleeding cash.
In any discussion, the focus of concern must be on how to maintain the basic function of public hospitals ― providing health care for the most vulnerable classes at low cost. All others, such as high labor costs, low facility utilization ratio, regional oversupply of medical services, should be secondary, because these institutions have been, and will be, working as lifesavers for the needy and/or the elderly and patients with chronic diseases.
And this is why other heads of local governments, including Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon and Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Mun-soo, are not giving up similarly bleeding public hospitals, drawing private investment and earning government subsidies.
Governor Hong says JMC incurs annual losses of between 4 to 6 billion won, but his provincial government pays 24 billion won a year to private contractors who built an expensive bridge linking two big islands, which experts say does not contribute much to the economy of the province. If economic efficiency and profitability should be the main criteria, the province should have stopped this white elephant instead of kicking out patients who have nowhere else to go.
Korea’s public hospitals account for only 10 percent of total medical service demand, compared with 35 to 100 percent in European countries. President Park, who made a campaign pledge to provide free treatment for people suffering with four serious diseases, should instruct her health and welfare minister to step in. This is not a provincial affair but an issue, which should determine not only the nation’s public health care but its overall medical system as somewhere between the publicly-funded systems seen in Europe and the private, commercial system in the United States.
Up to 70 percent of South Gyeongsang citizens oppose the closure of the JMC. President Park needs no further reason to revisit this issue as a matter of national concern.