Dear Editor:

Forty-six states, when combined, have 158 university medical schools, including our neighbors New Hampshire and Vermont. Many states have medical schools with 12 on the west coast and 14 in New York. These schools provide affordability for infant deliveries, research, and establish scientific partnerships in bio-engineering research, and patents. UCLA’s October 2018 report demonstrated an $11.06 billion economic return to the state, and over time included 24 start-up businesses and 1,226 patents, some of which are used in commercial industries.

Why does that matter in Maine? At a healthcare meeting I learned that delivery of a baby at a Maine hospital was $30,000, higher than I could afford when living in California. My regular gynecologist advised me that I could not afford her cost, nor the hospital’s cost, to deliver my son. She recommended I make the arrangements for delivery at UCLA’s campus hospital. Fortunately I did that, and was not charged for the delivery since I volunteered as a teaching patient, and my son, who had an ABO blood allergy (he is A and I am O blood type), had to stay in the hospital until there were no more allergic symptoms.

Maine doctors cannot recommend university hospitals in Maine, making healthcare more expensive in Maine.

I also learned at the same meeting that if we don’t find ways to solve many of our healthcare needs, we could see a reduction of Maine’s 15 hospitals down to four for the entire state. When I left California in 1982 UCLA had only one hospital serving the medical school, but today they have four hospitals on one campus.

Fifteen years ago I pointed out the need for a School of Medicine, but a former legislator said it was too expensive. In my book it is costing us a bundle of cash not to have a School of Medicine and it is likely costing us loss of citizens who move and loss of lives who stay. Why can’t Maine get their School of Medicine plan on the map with Orono science/bio-engineer partnerships included? Borrowed doctors from Tufts don’t generate economic returns to Maine.

Jarryl Larson

Edgecomb