EDITORIAL: Through it all, Ness has been more
When the long, lean, sheepishly grinning Jon Ness arrived in North Idaho in 2010, he already had his game shoes on.
He didn’t come here from Montana to wait patiently on the bench and see how the health care game was played. A college basketball enthusiast with few peers in these parts — and that’s saying a lot with Gonzaga’s ascension to national power mirroring Ness’s tenure — Jon took Kootenai Medical Center’s playbook and, with the utmost respect, locked it away in the trophy case.
KMC had long been the county’s outstanding community hospital. Its leaders were comfortable providing many essential services and referring many others across the state line. But the population here was surging and the national health care landscape was changing fast. Community hospitals would be gobbled up by corporations with little or no skin in the local game.
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