The doctor is out

Did you see this one coming? I sure didn't. Sejal Hathi, the wiz kid who's been running the Oregon public health system for the past year (with help from the liquor industry) showed up on the Stanford Medical School website last week. She's taken some sort of faculty gig down there, as a "clinical instructor," in which she'll be seeing patients, I assume with med students in tow. Nobody around here had heard a peep about it until the Lund Report broke the story.

Hathi will be keeping her state gig in Salem at the same time as fulfilling her duties at Stanford. She says she'll only be schlepping down to Palo Alto on weekends and holidays. She says she misses actually caring for patients.

Wow. The questions that this raises are numerous.

First, if she wants to see patients so badly, why did she take a desk job as the head of an enormous state bureaucracy?

Second, if she wants to see patients, how about some local patients? Oh no, says the doctor. My agency regulates doctors in Oregon, and so I can't see patients in Oregon. Have to stay ethical. Everyone in Salem is so ethical.

Hmmmm. Well, how about patients in Vancouver, Washington, a short drive away, rather than two longer drives with a plane ride in between? Well, for one thing, that doesn't let you put "Stanford" on your résumé.

I commuted to the Bay Area to teach one semester around 20 years ago. Flew down and back every week for several months. It was exhausting. And I wasn't working when I got back to Portland; I was on sabbatical from my job here. I know what's going to happen. Hathi is going to fly down to San Francisco or San Jose, deal with hellacious traffic when she gets there, check into a hotel or Air BnB or some friend's place, drive to Stanford, see patients, teach students, then fight the traffic back to the airport, another flight, then traffic in Portland... and then she'll be at her best when she shows up at work in Salem on Monday morning? No. Something's got to give.

And who's paying for all that travel? Hathi says she won't accept pay from Stanford, but what about her expenses of getting back and forth, and meals and lodging in the Bay Area? That wouldn't be coming out of her Oregon state expense account, would it?

The last question, and this may be the most important one, if Hathi's got all this energy to work weekends and holidays, why isn't she working those hours on behalf of the Oregon taxpayers who are reportedly paying her $265,488 a year plus benefits?

Putting all of this together, I'm concluding that the good doctor won't be around here much longer than another year, two at the most. If she's a hit at Stanford (where she went to med school herself), they'll offer her a real job down there, and she'll be in the wind. And even if they don't, she's probably thinking about her next stop. She's lasted longer than her immediate predecessor, who left promptly after taking a read on the "toxic" people in the department. But it appears that like him, she's about to exit stage left.

Even if Hathi sticks around, everything she does now will be filtered through this news. And she's smart enough to know that. You can hear the catcalls already. Who does she think she is, Jesse Beason?