An email I never sent regarding the misuse of tax dollars for medical education
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
To: ***********
From: Hector Parra
Subject: Re: *** Financial ***
Regarding FQHCs being the only clinics receiving Prop 1D equipment: I find this decision to be unethical.
The taxpayers approved bonds of "(a), the amount of two hundred million dollars ($200,000,000) [that] shall be used for capital improvements that expand and enhance medical education programs with an emphasis on telemedicine aimed at developing high-tech approaches to health care". Dealing only with FQHCs denies not the original education goals of such funds, but it denies the communities they were designed to serve, particularly with intra-community concepts such as inter-clinic communication and clinic-satellite communication, e.g. clinics to schools. There is a wealth of medical education and research opportunities here. If a medical department can cover the IT costs to support such a deployment they should be allowed to use this equipment.
I understand there are faculty who wish to deploy this equipment specifically for medical education purposes. I explained that under current policies they won't be able to use such equipment. I told them if they wanted to do so they should express this directly to the dean. HGPA
[The federal and state healthcare system, and everything involved in it, is broken. Likewise, you can't give grant money to an entity that is also acting as a corporation. I quit a month later.]
