Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990 TAG: 9003162725 SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Not the current strike by West Virginia schoolteachers, I hasten to add, though that is certainly a calamity too.
I refer to the crisis in Hinton and Summers County occasioned by the virtual collapse of the county Health Department, caused by disastrous cuts in its state funding.
Officials at the state capital in Charleston are embarrassed, to be sure, but by what the department's three employees did to surmount the crisis, not by the crisis itself.
Statistics tell the underlying tale: the Summers County Health Department budget had fallen from $106,000 in 1987 to $60,000 in 1989 and is expected to drop to $50,524 this year.
A state "budget crunch" as well as hard economic times in Summers County are given as the principal reasons - "budget crunches" being the normal condition of American state governments in the wake of Reaganism, coal troubles and railway falloff being contributing conditions.
So Charleston told the Summers County department employees to seek "novel" avenues of funding. They did. They wrote asking financial assistance not only to the county, the state legislature, eight private foundations, members of Congress and the White House but - deeply mortifying the fat cats in Charleston - to the embassies of the United Kingdom, France and Japan, the United Nations World Health Organization and the Soviet Union, which is said to be having troubles of its own.
They pointed out, to make their case, that their area is in many respects as disease-ridden as many so-called "Third World" countries and should be as eligible as they for assistance: Summers County leads West Virginia in deaths from obstructive pulmonary disease, is second among West Virginia counties in diabetes, fourth in breast cancer, 14th in heart disease and generally above the national average in other medical categories.
The department's plea made headlines, of course, nationally as well as locally, and state officials were not pleased at the sorry light Summers County's plight cast on West Virginia. But "they're embarrassed at what we did," says sanitarian Stephen Trail, when "what they should be embarrassed about is babies dying and senior citizens' death rates and our disease rate."
The result? Modest, apparently. A woman in Tokyo sent a contribution. The Diabetes Resource Center in California sent $70 worth of diabetes-testing supplies. The Kellogg Foundation is making an $8,000 grant to pay for a three-year study of Summers County's health problems. Nice, but meanwhile services in diagnostic and advisory areas are being sharply diminished.
Here, it seems to me, is a crystalline example of what eight years of Reagan and one of Bush have done to the United States:
Years of ludicrously swollen "defense" spending - to best an "enemy" who, it turns out, isn't interested any longer in being an enemy - have plunged the nation into an abyss of debt.
States - and none more so than poor states like West Virginia - are thrown back on their own resources, which are meager anyway.
Essential public services - health, education, aid to the poor and homeless, repair of the nation's infrastructure - suffer across the spectrum.
Public officials excuse their derelictions as the inevitable consequences of "budget crunches"; but:
They refuse - after reading Bush's lips and the election returns - to raise taxes; and:
In the end they shoot the messenger rather than heed the message.
This is not the behavior of the prosperous, progressive and farsighted nation that until recently the United States was. It is the behavior of the greedy, craven, indifferent and foolish society Reagan forged and Bush perpetuates. Apres moi, said Louis XV, le deluge.