Valley Health System Bond Measure

I just got off the phone with a gal who was hired to do a survey concerning a new measure to sell $400 million in bonds to raise money for Valley Health System.

First, this gal seemed to have extreme difficulty reading her computer monitor. She kept wanting to say "Hamlet Valley Medical Center" and "McAfee Valley Medical Center". At first she asked me if I would use any of these hospitals, and I said "no", because I had never heard of them. But several questions later, I realized that she meant "Hemet Valley Medical Center" and "Menifee Valley Medical Center". Well, I guess that part of her survey got skewed!

Anyways, it seems that Valley Health System wants to raise our property taxes, so that it has extra money to improve hospital services, namely adding more beds, building a cancer center in Menifee, and expanding emergency rooms.

But the survey also noted that Valley Health Center was in debt, and in her questioning, the gal mentioned the figure of $95 million. I'm not saying that is accurate, that's simply what her questionnaire noted.

While I certainly do want improved health care services, raising taxes is not the answer in my point of view. In fact, raising money through the sale of bonds is an age old practice with quasi-government institutions such as Valley Health System, and yet look at the state they're in.

I don't know enough of the inner-workings of Valley Health System to understand the dynamics. What I do know is that every election, there is another bond-measure to raise money to fix the problems with our local healthcare system, or our school district, or our law enforcement services. And yet, it seems like those problems never get fixed.

I don't claim to have the solutions for this, but I know that the existing systems don't seem to provide any satisfaction to taxpayers, and if you consider history, it looks like they never will. So instead of throwing more money at it, how about we completely scrap it, and build something entirely different?