Begging for help
I am writing as a concerned mother, wife and emergency medicine physician in Hilo. I am writing today with a heavy heart as I have worked several shifts throughout the past months that highlight the disparity of health care in Hawaii versus the mainland, and especially on the outer islands.
The lack of resources on the Big Island seems to have been accepted for quite some time. I think our people deserve better.
I watched someone’s sister die from a massive heart attack because we do not have an emergent interventional cath lab on the Big Island.
I watched people with spinal infections sit in our ER for days because all the Oahu hospitals are full, and there is no neurosurgeon on the Big Island.
I watched us exhaust our blood supply on multiple occasions.
Children often spend days and days sitting in the same room awaiting a spot at a pediatric psychiatric facility on Oahu.
Hospitals on Oahu are overwhelmed. The population is not decreasing, and the expectations are not decreasing either. I am very hopeful that one day the people of the Big Island will have the same chance to survive as those who live on Oahu, but that day is not soon upon us.
I beg our representatives to give us on the Big Island and Oahu better resources to care for our children, our community.
Casey Herrforth
Trauma director, Hilo Medical Center
Higher taxes and fees
The current national political trend is the “Green Raw Deal.” At our local level, Big Island residents are being barraged with esoteric environmental projects that are cost prohibitive to implement.
The reuse flea markets at the county rubbish dumps take a low six figure subsidy. Garbage amended compost will be a low eight figure money grab. Unnecessary wastewater lagoons in Ka‘u come into the eight figures.
Add all of this up, and Harry Kim raises our fees and taxes again. Remember his “zero waste” policy?
None of this matters to the insiders behind the “Green Door.” They are living on our money and their sycophants are chasing rainbows over hemp fields.
Gee, whiz, where did that unicorn go?
Jerry Warren
Naalehu
