The leaders of the hospitals in the Twin Cities should get together for a heart-to-heart talk.

We’ve recommended this before. We’re heartily recommending it again.

We know they can work together to promote efficiency and reduce duplication, as they did with the recent round of flu shots, as they have done with a combined laundry effort. We picture their pillowcases tumbling dry together in sublime harmony.

These two pillars of the community, employing hundreds and with payrolls of millions of dollars, could easily be wise models for the rest of us, and in the process they could save us – the residents who depend on them in emergencies – a few bucks on the heart-stopping increases in health care costs.

Instead, too often, the leaders of our hospitals fail to cooperate.

Take as one example the recent announcement that St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center may again resume doing angioplasty procedures. In commenting on the state’s OK to resume this lifesaving technique, a hospital administrator called heart disease “one of the biggest threats to this community.”

For a healthy person, at least, St. Mary’s is within easy walking distance of the spiffy new heart complex at Central Maine Medical Center. Some have argued that it, too, was not needed, that the services it would provide were duplications of services provided in Portland. But we’ve driven to Portland; it’s a long way away, even for a healthy person. In that regard, at least, having a heart center in Lewiston made sense.

But having two Twin Cities locations doing this intricate, expensive heart procedure less than a mile from each other seems sad, for another of the biggest threats to this community is the fact that people can’t afford health care. By duplicating services, the hospitals are costing us money when they could be economizing and saving us some.

Although the issue of hospital duplication is on the Baldacci horizon for budget cutting, an agenda that may even include closing some Maine hospitals, clearly the state has been ineffective in addressing this highly political issue. When the state’s certificate of need is not needed, as has been ruled in the St. Mary’s case, the community’s need for wisdom in such matters is not being met.

To limit duplication, to promote efficiency, the local hospitals are apparently going to have to do it themselves.

Angioplasty, by the way, is the procedure where doctors stick a small balloon into a blood vessel, then inflate it, hoping to increase blood flow. Yes, it would be spectacular if every hospital could do angioplasties. And think how many lives we could save if every convenience store could do them.

But Maine can’t afford that sort of convenience.

What Mainers can do, however, with all our hearts, is to urge hospital leaders to bring as much wisdom to the bargaining table as they do to the operating table.

And hurry, please. It’s an emergency.