Mercy Health Partners is sponsoring a community meeting this Monday, April 21st, at South Doyle Middle School to discuss their plans for the Baptist Hospital site. The meeting will begin at 6:30 PM, and will be held in the Commons area of the middle school.

The Mercy Health Partners voted this week to make the Baptist Hospital campus the site for their new $400 million hospital. That hospital will replace both the present St. Mary’s Hospital’s main campus and Baptist Hospital’s main campus. This is a major investment in South Knoxville and the south waterfront, and should be of interest to anyone who lives in South Knoxville or has an interest or stake in the area.

A few months ago, Knoxville was the site of a shocking event: hundreds of East Tennesseans and others from nearby areas flooded into downtown to seek medical care that had become unaffordable to them. A few months later, we learned that Baptist Hospital, one of the biggest and best of our fine local hospitals, was to be absorbed by the St. Mary's system.

Is it possible that these two events are related? Could it be that, if we had universal, single-payer health care, those hard-working Tennesseans who were reduced to begging for what in most civilized countries is a basic human right would have filled those unused beds at Baptist, thereby averting the closure of one of the best hospitals in the area?

Why have we chosen to enrich the private insurance companies, close our hospitals, and subject more and more of our citizens to ill health and bankruptcy? You always hear that "rationing" of health care is a result of socialized health care, but it's increasingly obvious that unrestrained capitalism is the real culprit.