The Hospital In Crisis

Perhaps nothing points up the disaster that the health care system in this country has turned out to be as sharply as the financial problems now facing Southampton Hospital.

The rapid and largely unregulated advent of health maintenance organization power over the delivery of care, following upon the debacle of the national health-care debate in the first Clinton Administration, has left hospital administrators, here and elsewhere, the terrible job of crisis management. It's not a comfortable situation.

Everyone hopes that the crisis is temporary; that sooner rather than later government will face its responsibility to the public and rein in the nonmedical decision-making and greed that catapulted us to the present situation.

Small regional hospitals, such as Southampton, can do many things right. While they cannot be expected to provide the most complex protocols or many renowned specialists, they can be models of good medicine as far as they go. We have relied on this in Southampton.

Support for it has been almost universal. No one wants to see the hospital we depend on, the place where many of us were born or gave birth, where family and friends have let go of life, or been mended and set on healthier courses, in trouble. And no one wants to imagine that a time could come when the staff there will not be adequate to the public's needs.

In keeping with the national emphasis on public education and preventive medicine among hospitals rather than only the treatment of disease, however, Southampton Hospital would seem to have extended its reach too far too soon. Optimists, the administrators of the hospital, led by Dr. John J. Ferry Jr., believed that the new H.M.O. show would work, or, at the very least, be cost-effective.

So Southampton went with the flow, riding the wave of rapid change until the foam came crashing down all over. As might be expected under such circumstances, a lot of patching up is left to be done.

We expect the hospital to do the job - well - for all our sakes.