Loading ...Forty years ago when I came here, ‘Hilo Hospital’ was a local tongue-in-cheek Joke. It was a place that old, hack, incompetent doctors from the mainland came to hide out. Anything complex and the patient got airlifted 250 miles to Honolulu.
In the past decade that has changed dramatically. First as part of a rural medical support program from the Feds. Hilo hospital became a department of the tiny rural Ka’u hospital who got all the Federal funds. Then software billionaire Marc Benioff bought a house here and decided to support the local hospital… to the tune of about $250 million by now. The hospital is doubling in size and the number of beds. New clinics and specialists in new buildings across the road. Now the ‘Hilo Benioff Medical Center’ is far above it’s class for an island of only about 200 thousand residents. I had robotic laparoscopic colon surgery five years ago there, and now a total hip replacement by a fabulous young orthopedic surgeon from California who has only been here two years… and he loves it here.
And hey… I live out in the boonies on an active volcano. We got off-grid aged hippies living in the jungles here. But we got damn good health care that rivals Honolulu.