We learn that Cone Health is committing to spend five million dollars to build a “community complex” in east Greensboro that will feature, according to the Rhino Times:
… maker spaces, lounges to write, work or study in, and various spaces geared toward different age groups.
It won’t just have basketball courts and swimming pools; in addition, it will include other sports facilities and an aquatic center with lots of water-based amenities.
The complex will consist of indoor aquatics including a “lazy river, water slide and lap swim, teaching kitchen, gymnasium, walking track, weight room, fitness room, sensory space, dedicated spaces for children, teens, and seniors, and flexible programming rooms and spaces both indoor and outdoor.”
Likewise, the park connected to the complex won’t just offer a traditional playground and a ballpark; it will feature “universal play spaces,” outdoor gym facilities as well as “a place to celebrate the significant history of a community.”
In addition, the 65,000-square-foot complex will encourage living practices that promote health, wellness and social interaction – and it will offer access to both city and county services.
That is all very nice. It remains an open question as to whether this somehow represents an extension of the hospital system’s “woke medicine” posture. Select a minority community and deluge it with benefits to right previous wrongs.
But how can Cone Health do this? After all, it is regarded as a charitable, philanthropic institution– not a corporate behemoth.
The vast majority of its revenues from hospital services come from governmental payors– especially the federal government. That means tax dollars, federal deficit dollars and (to a lesser extent) Medicare premiums enable the empires that hospital systems build. But private insurance and individuals also write checks to Cone Health, probably to a much lesser extent.
But to throw money away on such a “community complex”, the hospital system must be flush with cash flow from the above sources.
This announcement comes at nearly the same time the hospital system is buying the Centenary United Methodist Church property on Friendly Avenue, and another property on Horsepen Creek Rd. near the soon-to-be-built Atrium surgical center and future hospital.
A hospital system that is not supposed to be for-profit generates huge amounts of profit to expand its empire at the expense of taxpayers, premium payers and ultimately our children and grandchildren (considering the huge debt load the federal government carries to pay for socialized health care). It also generates this profit at the expense of employees who have their hours at work cut precipitously at times.
When Cone Health builds a lovely “community complex” in east Greensboro, the rest of us pay for it indirectly.