Dallas County Commissioners face a challenging task in their consideration of candidates to replace the four recently resigned members of Parkland Hospital’s Board of Managers. Dallas Area Interfaith is watching the process with great interest and deep concern.

The involvement of Dallas Area Interfaith leadership in the issue of Parkland’s budget crisis is because we recognize our county’s critical dependence upon Parkland Hospital and its Community Outreach Patient Clinics. The future of Parkland affects the quality of life for every citizen of Dallas County.

Dallas Area Interfaith takes the position that the following will go far in helping the County Commissioners and the Board of Managers deal with Parkland’s present difficulties:

· Respect and encourage the presence and participation of citizens in public meetings

· Develop a budget adequate to restore confidence in quality service for inpatients and outpatients and which restores staffing and/or overtime in Community Oriented Primary Care Clinics

· Support an increase in Dallas County Hospital District tax rate for 2004 to cover restoration of certain services and to meet Parkland’s budget shortfall

· Take action to ensure that surrounding counties pay their “fair share” for their indigent and uninsured residents who utilize Parkland

· Vigorously oppose proposed tax cuts in Austin which impede the ability of our County Commissioners to promote and protect the viability of our county hospital.

The narrow view, that curtailing services at Parkland for patients who are undocumented or indigent thereby making Parkland “profitable” is both hollow and unjust! Scapegoating the undocumented and the poor for Parkland’s budget woes, declares a segment of our population to be disposable. We implore our County Commissioners not to appoint men and women whose ideology scapegoats segments of this county as disposable and unworthy.

Parkland is charged with delivering health care for all the residents of Dallas County. The quality of life for those who least can afford it will be diminished by deep cuts that will ultimately impact the delivery of vitally important health services. Dallas Area Interfaith rejects the notion that Parkland’s budget woes can be balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable in our county! The citizens impacted by such cuts are not strangers; they are our family, friends and neighbors.

In the aftermath of September 11, a reporter found a scrap of letterhead for a company. The charred remains of that paper had only a portion of the company’s name left. It read “America Inc…” Whatever the name of the company was, it is a metaphor for how we have come to think of our country: “America Inc.”

We tend to think of our country as a corporation and its citizens as stockholders, with the goal of its economic components to “turn a profit” and to provide “dividends” to the largest “investors”. Whatever impacts the “bottom line” negatively, is considered a “bad investment”. We cannot ask the “stockholders”, tax paying citizens, to make a greater “investment” in components that aren’t “profitable” and institutions like Parkland are forced to “downsize” and “outsource”.

There was a time when we referred to America as a “commonwealth” and we used language like “the common good”, in the nobility of providing a safety net for our less fortunate. This was not America Inc.; this was “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” What is happening at Parkland is happening all over our country because we are failing to understand the difference between America Inc., and what we used to be.

How we regard or disregard the most vulnerable of our society is the true measure of whether we live in a just and compassionate society.