Robert Fromberg
Editor in Chief, HFMA
I just got off the plane from Orlando, but wanted to take a moment to share a few particularly poignant words expressed by Fred Lucky, Senior Vice President of the Kansas Hospital Association, after he was awarded the Frederick C. Morgan Award for Individual Achievement at the Wednesday evening Chairman's Banquet--the final event at ANI. These words capture so much of the sentiment expressed during ANI this year:
I want to leave you with some final thoughts – thoughts that I think about every day on my drive to work –
We work in a noble profession, perhaps the noblest of all. I think about the daily miracles that happen in hospitals every day and I am in awe. Yet we are under constant scrutiny and criticism from business and political leaders that think we are too expensive, too costly, provide low quality, are not transparent enough, and take advantage of the uninsured. It’s enough to wear you down. Yet I think about all of those miracles, all of those babies being born in need of neonatal intensive care and having it available, all the trauma and burn centers that need the most sophisticated equipment and highly trained and skilled individuals in cities all across this country, all the Critical Access Hospitals in towns and communities that might wither up and die if they weren’t there, and of the tender and compassionate care of our hospice workers who bring dignity to the last hours of a patient’s life and I rejoice that I’m a part of it, however remotely.
Most of us in this room tonight are a lot alike. We can’t provide the care and compassion for patients that I just mentioned, but we can help provide the means, we can doggedly fight for adequate funding, we can try to correct a massively flawed payment system that appears to become even more so if CMS has its way. That’s why membership in HFMA is so important. It makes my job so much easier and rewarding and I know it does yours as well.
Let me end with this quote from Winston Churchill “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
