Editorial cartoon was unfair

Your editorial cartoon in the 2/17/17 edition of The Taos News implying that patients were going to be discharged inappropriately after a 96-hour stay was inflammatory and displays a poor understanding of the reasons why Holy Cross Hospital needs to attain critical access status. 

The 96-hour status refers to the average length of stay for patients in the hospital and is tempered by many qualifications that enter in to the calculation. In addition, the hospital can be financially penalized if patients are discharged prematurely resulting in a readmission to the hospital within a certain time frame. With or without critical access status, Holy Cross has very strong incentives to ensure that patients are discharged only when their medical status has been stabilized to allow them to return to and remain at home.

It is estimated that 20 to 40 percent of the acute care hospitals in the U.S. will close by 2020. This risk is especially high in small, rural hospitals that serve a large number of low income patients, such as Holy Cross. Achieving critical access status is a key strategy for Holy Cross to maintain financial viability and not to be one of those facilities that closes before the end of the decade. Your editorial cartoonist might have been more informative by portraying where patients in Taos will go without a hospital in the community.