Our sympathies to the 61 board members of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Previously, the names of these overseers of the health care leviathan were not readily available. In fact, UPMC wouldn't tell you. One was forced to check IRS documents to obtain their identities.
Today, they're on the Internet and thus exposed widely to the inconvenience of accountability to the public, whose interests they are obligated to serve.
Ah, transparency .
The new practice alleviates the impression UPMC had something to hide, even though, it contends, it does not.
How grand that the self-styled leader in modern health care in 2005 has comprehended the ancient maxim that secretiveness invites suspicion. UPMC is, after all, the biggest kid on the block and a target of inquiry.
Indeed, that dust-up after it imperiously tried to scale back its new Children's Hospital -- with President Jeffrey A. Romoff's fine hand at the tiller -- couldn't have helped its image.
But why so many board members⢠Well, every time UPMC acquired a hospital, the objects of its appetite required "representation."
Whether these multitudinous voices constitute effective governance, or are window dressing, is a different matter. One always has the sense the Mr. Romoff is in charge and would not at all mind the discontinuities of a five-dozen-member board.
Sad, that.
