Another icon biting the dust?
Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina provides an interesting parallel to SECU. Both were created in times of economic difficulty; chartered on a mutual, cooperative basis; designed to help working men and women acquire two of the basic necessities of living - access to credit and access to healthcare.
North Carolinians came together to create locally owned, locally controlled, locally focused solutions. Perhaps you don't understand the powerful advantage of local community ownership, focus, and control? Lets take a look at another "right-here-at-home" example, Mission Health in Asheville.
Mission Hospital traces its roots to 1885, when a group of women calling themselves "The Little Flower Mission" saw a need for a hospital in Asheville that would care for those in need, regardless of their ability to pay. Mission Health became the state's sixth-largest health system and Western North Carolina's only not-for-profit, independent community hospital system governed and managed exclusively in western North Carolina.
Mission Hospital "stayed on mission" until 2019. The $1.5 billion sale of Mission Health to the for-profit HCA Healthcare, was completed on February 1, 2019.
"Since the purchase was finalized, there has been a stark rise in the number of complaints from patients and staff alike regarding the hospital - including long wait times in the emergency department, chronic under-staffing, broken equipment, unsanitary conditions, patients lying in feces for extended periods of time, medication administration being delayed for hours at a time, nurses taking on twice their normal workload, and doctors leaving due to pay disputes."
If you'd like to check on the latest response by HCA Healthcare to the recent Helene devastation in North Carolina take a look at this [link].
What does this have to do with the "new/new" being implemented by the SECU Board? Perhaps quite a lot if you think the original "mission" of SECU remains important.
Regional expansion, commercial vs not-for-proit, loss of local ownership and control?
SECU, it is yours to lose... but lets hope not.
