Healthy Trade
DownEast Magazine
Reprinted by permission from the May 1998 issue of Down East Magazine. Copyright 1998 by Down East Enterprise, Inc., Camden, Maine. All rights reserved.
Healthy Trade
Used to be, Maine farmers commonly paid their property taxes by working on town roads or providing a wagonload of fence posts and lumber for town projects. That tradition has largely died in modern times, but Franklin Memorial Hospital in the western Maine town of Farmington has revived the idea, with a twist. Local people with little or no health insurance can pay for their hospital care with their time rather than their hard-earned money.
The Contract for Care program, which for example, allowed one resident to pay off an $8,000 gallbladder operation with four months of part-time clerical work, is reportedly the only one its kind in the United States, according to hospital spokesman Pete Tucker, “but it’s attracting a lot of attention from over the country. I’ve had calls from the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe. I just got off the phone with a woman from Columbus, Georgia, who wants to introduce the idea down there.”
Tucker credits hospital president Richard Batt with coming up with the plan more than a year ago. “Three people went through the pilot program last year,” Tucker says. “It was so successful that in January we took it to the board of directors and made it a full-fledged program.”
The local reaction to the program “has been tremendous,” Tucker says, estimating that in the program’s first two months at least 100 people called to ask about their eligibility, which is determined by federal poverty guidelines. Their friends and relatives can also contribute time and effort on their behalf.
The seventy-bed hospital serves about 40,000 people in the Franklin County region. “The local unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, about double the state average,” Tucker notes. “Fifteen to 20 percent of the population has no health insurance at all, and a sizable number of the rest are underinsured.” For those people and many others, Franklin Memorial’s Contract for Care is a healthy trade.