“Tennessee, Tennessee, there ain’t no place I’d rather be” sang the Greatful Dead back in the day. Why that bunch of stoned hippies wanted to go 1,500 miles away from the good stuff from Humboldt I’ll never know, but Knoxville, Tennessee is a very typical second-tier American town with typical hospital issues. And what are those issues? Well the Knoxville News Senitnel had a CEO Roundtable to tell y’all.

No prizes for guessing them, and they are a fair reflection of the state of the nation’s hospitals.

A. We need more money from the government and everyone else.
B. We have too many uninsured patients and they won’t go away.
C. We can’t get enough nurses and other staff.
D. This new IT is very expensive and no one will let us charge for it.
E. We like our gentlemanly southern ways and we really hope that no specialty hospitals comes to town to break up all this gentility. Cos then we’d get mad.
F. And if you build too many new hospitals too quickly and can’t fill them, you’re going to lose money

UPDATE: Hope Morrison from the Appalachia Alumni blog informs me that I am “unaware that there’s a Humboldt in Tennessee. I know because I spent about half of my formative years a stone’s throw away from there, in Jackson.” Of course with the Dead that might well have been a “stoner’s” throw away.

Which reminds me… Ian McLagan, keyboard player of legendary English bands The Small Faces and The Faces and later perennial sidesman with The Rolling Stones tells that the story of when he was offered him a gig touring with the Dead at $300K a year. He was excited as he was down on his financial luck and he asked for a tape as he didn’t know their stuff. He told the interviewer: “it was such a pity. I couldn’t play with them because I thought their music was bloody awful!”