To the Editor:

We are writing to express our concern over the abrupt closure of Altamont Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and dismissal of Dr. Hedy Migden, our caring and beloved physician. Dr. Migden often worked five-and-a-half days a week, 10 hours a day, and sometimes made house calls to those too frail to come to her office.

Her practice was closed suddenly on July 5 without any advance notice to her or her patients by St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates. We only learned of this closure from another patient who was told his upcoming visit was cancelled since Dr. Migden was “no longer with the practice.”

As her patients for over 20 years, we followed Dr. Migden to four different offices with no break in our care. With this abrupt closure, we were never even told even after she had left.

When Marilee called for a prescription renewal, all we were told was, in effect, that we were on our own. As we (and her other 7,000 other patients) are now finding, there are not a lot of local primary care providers just waiting to see new patients in this area. This closure will significantly disrupt our lives.

While many may like to think that our primary care doc runs his or her own practice, medical care has increasingly become more and more corporate and bureaucratic. Dr. Migden’s practice was actually under St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates, a 350-physician practice where the doctors are now employees.

The old St. Peter’s Hospital is now St. Peter’s Health Partners and includes three other local hospitals, The Eddy long-term care system, and operates out of 165 locations with 12,500 employees. It is, in turn, owned by Trinity Health. Trinity Health is headquartered in Livonia, Michigan and controls over 80 hospitals which employ 120,000 in 26 states.

We still have never even been formally notified that her practice is now closed and, as we understand, will not reopen.

Apparently, St. Peter’s Medical Associates and its management have little interest in the health of thousands of patients in the Hilltowns, Guilderland, Altamont, and eastern New York State that Altamont Internal Medicine and Pediatrics served.

Brian worked directly for Sister Ellen Lawlor, St. Peter’s administrator and a member of the Sisters of Mercy, in the 1970s. It seems that in the new medical behemoth mercy and the lowly patient are being lost in this medical industrial complex.

Marilee Grygelko

Brian Hendricks

Altamont

Editor’s note: See related story.