Editor,
What! Another private equity player in our local health care services. It’s Blackstone again. A recent article in Cascadia about past Bellingham PeaceHealth emergency room doctor, Dr. Ming Lin, who was fired by his employer, TeamHealth, owned by Blackstone, which provides contractual ER services to PeaceHealth (CDN, Jan. 8, 2025).
Be careful if you think that a bill from TeamHealth for ER physician services will be accepted by your insurance. It is possible that your health insurer, like mine, will see that service as “out of network” and deny payment.
It could be that your insurer knows that TeamHealth is owned by Blackstone “money is the object” private equity business. These private equity folks are recognized as experts in how to extract profits for their investors. I would never expect that private equity cares much about the individuals in PeaceHealth’s ER other than what funds they can extract.
Private equity TeamHealth is currently posting a job for emergency medicine assistant medical director at PeaceHealth hospital in Bellingham. There is also a posting for an ER physician.
All emergency medicine service physicians and directors need to be insurance-accepted hospital employees.
There is no place for private equity in our health system. We used to think of our hospitals — St. Joe’s and St. Luke’s — as community hospitals with local and influential community boards, but no longer. It’s private equity invading our health system from the bottom up.
Craig MacConnell
Bellingham
Editor,
I am writing in response to the Sustainable Connections announcement reporting the “pause” of the fruit program at Cloud Mountain Farm Center. I am incredibly disappointed in this decision by SC and the board.
Sustainable Connections made a statement to the farming community and funders of Sustainable Whatcom and Whatcom Community Foundation to maintain the structure and mission of CMFC when they accepted the merger. In the five years since that statement, they shut down the incubator farm program that provides opportunities for farmers without land to grow and develop products leading to their own operations. The internship program has also been eliminated, which provided hands-on education and experience for individuals interested in food production. This program directly advanced skilled people in agriculture in Whatcom County.
CMFC has been a resource for information and education on fruit production in this area for more than 40 years. The crop and product trials and introductions conducted by Cloud Mountain, WSU and other organizations have benefited local farmers, gardeners and homeowners. Fruit plants grown at CMFC have been shipped throughout the country and many fruit varieties have been a mainstay at farmers markets and local groceries.
Please join me and encourage the leadership and board of SC to rethink dismantling the fruit production program. CMFC is essential to the development of regenerative agriculture practices in Whatcom County. SC should refer to its own vision and mission statements posted on its website and restore the CMFC fruit production program.
George Kaas
Bellingham
Editor,
I enjoyed your CDN column on President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and their involvement in Habitat for Humanity (CDN, Jan. 9, 2025). In 1991, my late husband, Rev. Douglas Langholz, and I lived in Clearwater, Florida. He was the pastor of Grace Lutheran Church and organized a group of men and women who journeyed across the state to be a part of the Carter Work Project at Liberty City in Miami that you featured in your article.
They loved working with the president and Rosalynn, and the experience of hard, hot roofing immensely affected them all.
Son Joel is the pastor at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Fairhaven and his wife Rebecca is pastor at Zion Lutheran in Ferndale. They understand the incredible housing needs in our community, nation and world that Habitat for Humanity works to alleviate.
For years, Interfaith Coalition worked with Our Saviour’s and Christ the Servant Lutheran to jointly provide housing for needy families. I personally worked with my husband on local Habitat projects in Clearwater and in Seattle when he was pastor at Magnolia Lutheran Church.
Doug died of ALS in 2002. I also have supported our local Whatcom chapter and am a registered volunteer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of us at Affinity/Bellingham provided lunches to the Telegraph Road Habitat crew every Friday for almost a year.
Thank you for bringing attention to this remarkable HfH organization, the fine work that it provides in our communities and the leadership of the Carters. I would love for your readers to learn more about our Whatcom County Habitat chapter, ways to volunteer locally and avenues for financial support that would honor the Carters at hfhwhatcom.org.
Mary Grace Langholz
Bellingham
Editor,
I appreciate Rep. Alex Ramel’s reminder to his colleagues and fellow citizens that fixing our regressive tax structure is essential to closing the state’s budget shortfall (CDN, Jan. 8, 2025). Jimmy Carter embraced the values of economic fairness, shared sacrifice and commitment to the public good — and we should, too.
Frances Posel
Bellingham
Editor,
I have worked in King County as a farmer and farmer advocate for two decades, and I can clearly state that Mr. Likkel (CDN, Jan. 21, 2025) is 100% correct in his assessment of King County farmland.
Many farms are now used as nothing more than stormwater ponds. Does anyone really believe that asphalt and concrete are better for salmon? Farmers in King have been brought down by a thousand cuts. Where there used to be over a hundred dairies, there now stands maybe 20 left.
Some extreme environmentalists might applaud this as a ‘win,’ but I’d like to know where and how they think people will get their milk and cheese? If legislative reps believe they can regulate citizens out of their meat and dairy consumption habits, then they are mistaken.
As you read this, portions of the Amazon rainforest are being burned to make space for more beef cattle. If we think the Central Valley of California can sustain appetites for nut-based milk, please look no further than LA burning to the ground now. They need their water too.
We cannot continue to use farmers as scapegoats for our guilt in consuming too much. Farmers in Western Washington simply do not have the political capital to fight these ridiculous regulations and lawsuits.
The fact is that there is no water shortage problem here. There is only a water storage problem. While we are all busy wringing our hands over litigation, the oligarchs are taking over the federal government. Support your local farmers!
Liz Stockton
Sedro-Woolley
Editor,
Is bird flu on your mind? Every time you look at the price of eggs you’re reminded of the millions of chickens that have been slaughtered because of infections.
I encourage you to look up the Gain-of-Function research on H5N1 at the University of Wisconsin. Read how they have taken a fairly benign bird flu bug and made it more transmissible to and between mammals, including humans. Read how accidental lab exposures happened and how reporting of those accidents to the NIH was delayed and mishandled.
Read how people with exposures were sent home to quarantine and take Tamiflu because staff didn’t want them in their hospital. Two cougars were killed recently because they were infected with H5N1 in Jefferson County, near Port Townsend. Do you think it was the natural variety of bug that used to be hard to transmit to mammals, or the lab-grown bug that was created to infect and kill mammals? Don’t worry, they have a vaccine for the bug they made. It is time to end Gain-of-Function research.
Mark A. White
Port Angeles
Editor,
Simple minds like simple answers and there are no simpler minds in sway in American politics today than the simple-minded voters who thought Trump’s simple promises to lower taxes for the rich while rounding up and deporting those willing to do the cheap labor our grocery prices rely on would somehow lead to nirvana.
Too bad the 78 million who voted in this shockingly inept cluster of self-proclaimed political geniuses and “captains of industry” never took a class in economics that involved how interest rates, debt limits and bond markets interplay, or what forces are actually involved in getting necessary goods to market.
All they were told was that Trump had his hand on the magic slot machine handle and all would be right in the world. To them, it all seemed simple and somehow made sense. Unfortunately, they were simply wrong.
Michael Waite
Sedro-Woolley
Editor,
In the United States, women and girls are not legally guaranteed equal rights. We have seen the devastating consequences of this reality in our fights against unequal pay, workplace harassment, pregnancy discrimination, domestic violence, limited access to comprehensive health care, discrimination against LGBTQIA+ individuals and more.
As our nation braces for a rise in attacks on the liberties of women and girls, we need the only duly ratified constitutional amendment that has not been added to the Constitution: the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA rightfully became the 28th Amendment more than four years ago and will update the Constitution to provide nationwide protection against discriminatory federal and state laws.
The ERA is necessary to uphold and restore the rights of more than half our population. President Biden has acknowledged its ratification but passed the buck to a polarized Congress. This political punting has precluded the ERA’s publication and has cost people their health and lives. President Biden has the power to instruct the U.S. Archivist to certify and publish the amendment, making equal rights the law of the land.
With just days left in office, the League of Women Voters of Washington calls upon President Biden to pick up the phone and instruct the Archivist to finalize the ERA now.
Mr. President, your legacy is calling.
Mary Coltrane,
President, League of Women Voters of Washington
Editor,
What Bellingham City Council (CDN, Jan. 8, 2025) doesn’t get is that it is discourteous to make the public wait hours until the end of public meetings to speak during open comment. The council gets paid handsomely to listen, but the elderly, disabled and people paying for a babysitter while being bored by routine council business don’t.
The other thing the City of Bellingham doesn’t get is that open public comment can be about any public business, not just proposals from developers and city staff. Reading letters to the editor at Cascadia Daily News, I can tell you there are some thoughtful minds willing to offer their help in solving public problems.
It has unfortunately become the norm that bureaucrats think they know better than the public and politicians consider public participation an annoyance to pay lip service to while undermining it by their deeds. All the propaganda about public participation that Bellingham, Blaine and Washington state pay lip service to is just spectacle.
Jay Taber
Blaine
Editor,
Executive Editor Ron Judd’s encouraging, if necessarily brief overview of CDN’s staff and expanding coverage (CDN, Jan. 3, 2025) was negligent in at least one aspect, which I wish to address here.
I have found CDN’s local sports photography, such as “Preps in Pics,” to be a most excellent and rewarding feature of the Sports & Rec section. The name often credited with the images is Andy Bronson, who deserves mention for top-tier work and creative selection of frames to display (although there may well be good editors involved in that, too).
I do not follow most of the sports covered, but thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the sparkling action photography that also denotes solid journalism.
Jaco ten Hove
Bellingham
Letters to the Editor are published online Wednesdays; a selection is published in print Fridays. Send to letters@cascadiadaily.com by 10 a.m. Tuesdays. Rules: Maximum 250 words, be civil, have a point and make it clearly. Preference is given to letters about local subjects. CDN reserves the right to reject letters or edit for length, clarity, grammar and style, or removal of personal attacks or offensive content. Letters must include an address/phone number to verify the writer's identity (not for publication).
Guest writer: Whatcom County needs a new path to a modern index of public records