Dear Editor:

Adolf Hitler first described the technique of the “Big Lie,” used to great effect by Goebbels. People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.

Even many in the great majority who think St. Andrews should stay open believe the big lie that St. Andrews loses money. It does not. St. Andrews’ own audited financial statements say it is profitable.. But many people believe the Big Lie spread by MaineHealth and Lincoln County Healthcare. After all, they saw it repeated in the Boothbay Register, the Portland Press Herald and the Boston Globe.

St. Andrews makes money. This incontrovertible fact is proven by its audited financial statements. It has added well over $5 million of profits to its unrestricted net assets since 2001; in the last five years, it added over $500,000.

The “losses” so often cited for St. Andrews are flat wrong. Those losses result from deducting Depreciation and Amortization expense for capital items like buildings and equipment, but excluding the income which funded those investments in the first place.    

Steve Brill said in his blockbuster piece for Time Magazine, “Here and elsewhere I define operating profit as the hospital's excess of revenue over expenses, plus the amount it lists on its tax return for depreciation of assets .... John Gunn, chief operating officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, calls this the ‘fairest way’ of judging a hospital's financial performance.”

Adding in Depreciation and Amortization makes St. Andrews profitable even when citing the phony losses cited by MaineHealth/LCH. It more than offsets the losses that MaineHealth/LCH presents as the “bottom line” for St. Andrews. Those losses exist because depreciation expense is taken but not the restricted income that made the depreciation possible. They are the big lie about St. Andrews.

And guess what? It’s perfectly legal for MaineHealth/LCH to tell a blatant lie about St. Andrews finances.

Tom Hagan

Boothbay