It’s true. A Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center employee made a regrettable decision regarding his social life in late February. I’m sure he feels terrible and has learned incredible life lessons, which will make him a better doctor over the rest of his career following this breech of public trust.
Here’s what else you need to know. The other 7,000-plus D-H employees stand ready to care for you. Tropical Storm Irene, COVID-19 and nothing in between will deter us from our commitment to caring for our community. We will clean our facilities, sterilize our equipment and obsessively wash our hands. We will diligently try to protect ourselves so that we can remain at work to care for you. Like my colleagues, I will worry about my patients, my co-workers, my family, and sometimes even about myself.
But you do not need to worry about our resolve to be there for you and your family when it matters most. You also do not need to worry about your private health information. We will fiercely protect your privacy always. Why do we take your privacy so seriously? Because it’s the law, and you deserve it.
SCOTT JAYNES
Meriden
The writer is a board certified family physician affiliated with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
I remember Dec. 8, 1941. My fifth-grade class gathered at Miss Schenk’s radio as the inspiring voice of President Roosevelt intoned, “Yesterday, Dec. 7. …” Our nation needed presidential leadership — and got it. We overwhelmingly rallied in support our president’s war effort. And we prevailed.
We are now in the opening days of arguably the greatest global challenge since 1941. In addressing the nation and the globe, our current president has thus far fallen lamentably short of the mark set by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Donald Trump remains our president and we must honor the office he holds. And we must support whatever instincts he may have to honor the advice of the scientific and public health communities.
As has been said elsewhere, “If the followers will lead, eventually the leaders will follow.”
JIM HUGHES
West Fairlee
Internet scams based on the virus? Of course, but I recently got a call from the oldest scam on the landline, the police “association.” Those calls have been around since the telephone was invented, as a successor to selling tickets for the “policemen’s ball” of the 1890s. The caller is always “Jim Stevens” or “Bob James,” never Muhammad Hussein or Javier Gomez.
Of all of them my favorite pseudonym was “Jack Frost,” and the most memorable scamster outfit was a group out of Boston that set up a boiler room at a motel in White River Junction. Back in the 1980s they were working off the pictures of “missing children,” whose images then appeared on milk cartons.
The callers themselves were small-time losers, working off misdemeanors for the cops. But it didn’t last long. The weed stink coming out of the room was so strong the manager called — who else — the Hartford Police Department. (Why did they bother coming up here? Free local calls.)
So they’re still around, meaning there’s still suckers out there who respond to the intimidation aspect of the calls. I usually respond with a certain two-word expression, which is not, by the way, “No thanks.” That tends to get their attention, followed by a click.
DICK MACKAY
Hanover
On March 10, voters within the Fall Mountain Regional School District (comprised of Charlestown, Langdon, Alstead, Acworth and Walpole) sent a clear message that having Charlestown withdraw from the district was not a feasible (nor a popular) solution to solve the education funding crisis the town of Charlestown faces.
With a district-wide vote of 611 for withdrawal and 2,620 against, Article 11 was defeated in a landslide.
As an educator in Charlestown, I am elated that withdrawal was defeated, but I do agree that school funding is definitely an issue. The question now is, where do we go from here?
Charlestown has the highest local education tax rate in the state — at $24.02 per $1,000 of assessed property value — and therein lies the problem. We continue to put the cost of education on the backs of property owners. While this isn’t just a New Hampshire-based problem, there is a solution: electing Andru Volinsky as our next governor.
As executive counselor for New Hampshire’s 2nd District, Volinsky has been running a gubernatorial campaign focused almost exclusively on fair education funding and practices. As the lead lawyer on the 1990s Claremont school funding case, Volinsky has the experience needed to tackle this issue head on. He will appoint an education secretary who believes in public education, rather than someone like our current secretary, Frank Edelblut, who has jeopardized New Hampshire’s public education by advocating for voucher programs that allow taxpayer funding to be used for private schools.
Volinsky has held more than 40 public forums on this issue within the past two years and won’t be stopping anytime soon. The funding issues we face will not go away under the Sununu administration when his appointees are destroying every fiber of our public education system. New Hampshire deserves much better, which is why I will be voting for Andru Volinsky in the gubernatorial primary in September. As a public educator in Charlestown, and a resident of Claremont, I urge you to head to volinskynh.com and support him in September.
JOSHUA LAMBERT
Claremont