Grady

I shouldn't be blogging today. The semester is almost over and I've got more work to do than I can fathom.

But today, while working on my Op-Ed piece for our Health and Medical Journalism class, I began reading a string of articles at the AJC about Grady Hospital in Atlanta.

I first heard about Grady when my friend Elga was working as a Nurse in the Emergency Room. The stories she told were not for the faint of heart.

Located in Atlanta, with the best of only four trauma units in the state, 50% of Grady patients are covered by Medicaid. Apparently it is quite a zoo there, both patient-wise and administration-wise. My friend Elga lived in dread of full moon shifts in the E.R.

I've been reading about Grady's gradual slide into debt and disrepair for many years now. The more I read, the more confused I get about what the problems are and what the solution is.

The one thing I do know is that the people of Georgia want and need Grady hospital to survive. Grady is a medical home for many Atlantans in the same way that Charity hospital in New Orleans was for those Citizens.

More importantly, I discovered from the AJC articles, Grady is the States largest teaching hospital.

"Without it, the Morehouse School of Medicine, tasked with the mission of training doctors to work in underserved areas of the state, would not exist."--According to Mike King of the AJC

Our states largest teaching hospital is teetering on the verge of collapse. Why?

Aren't we all the same country?

If I live in the United States, why should my health care options here in Georgia be poorer than those of someone living in Massachusetts?
Why should I have less access to resources that would improve my health?

Read the Quote Below and Follow the Links

“The sad reality is that the uninsured don’t just struggle with costs themselves, they impose costs on the rest of us,” Mrs. Clinton said in September. “It’s a hidden tax: the high cost of emergency room visits that could have been prevented by a much less expensive doctor’s appointment, the cost of unpaid medical bills that lead insurance companies to raise rates on the rest of us.”

I took this from an article in last Sunday's New York Times "Massachusetts Faces a Test on Health Care."


Want more info on the Presidential Candidates Plans for Health Care?

Check out these websites:

NYTimes

The Association of Health Care Journalists

The Kaiser Family

Lessons from New Orleans: Part 1

Two weeks ago, during a research and reporting tour of New Orleans, I visited the former Charity hospital facilities. One of the first things I noticed about the empty building was the air conditioning units bulging out of the upper floor windows. Did they use electric heaters and portable radiators in the winter too?

Although the building had been ailing t for many years, damage from the flood is what ultimately caused the building to be closed, according to Diana Pinkley a representative from Women of the Storm, and our tour guide. The top two floors had actually been closed for longer than she could remember.

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, what remains of the Charity Hospital has been relocated to a nearby interim location. Meanwhile, the former building still stands as government officials debate whether to reopen or relocate.

But when it was open, two years ago, the window units were used. Not just one or two, but dozens of them.

Anybody who’s ever used one knows they are indeed a poor solution: dripping, rattling, energy guzzlers with little to no thermostat control—the quick fix to cooling emergencies here in the south.

For me, looking at such flimsy equipment being used at a hospital, they are a symbol of just how bad our healthcare has become here in the U.S. The window units were like seeing a Band-Aid on the building. Ailing people were treated in ailing facilities funded by an ailing medical system.

For years Charity was the preferred medical home of those without insurance. If you don’t have health insurance or money in the bank, you go to emergency rooms knowing that you won’t be turned away. So, like every emergency room around the country Charity struggled with how to fund facilities and care for those who couldn’t pay.

There are at least 45.8 million people, or approximately 16% of the population without insurance, according to the 2005 U.S. Census Bureau. With no other place to go, these people will continue to seek medical care at their local emergency rooms. As the number of uninsured people continues to increase, without a drastic change in our healthcare system, Band-Aids will not be enough; our hospital systems will continue to degrade.

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More thoughts on rationing

I was re-reading the blog I posted below and realized how informational it sounded. The thing is, as I wrote it, it was all something of a revelation to me.

See, I've never really thought about health care as something that needed to be rationed. I just assumed it was a distribution problem.

What's the difference between distributed and rationed? Rationing implies that there is a fixed amount to be divided, whereas distributing is only about dividing.

(It is interesting to note that the root of rationing is from Latin ratio: to reason.)

So the idea of health care being limited or the need for it to be divided out in specific, more reasonable ways is something that hasn't fully sunk in for me yet.

Why is health care limited? Why can't we all have access to it?

Covering this beat has got me thinking too hard about this stuff.

Some thoughts on Rationing

All health care is rationed in some way.

In the U.S. health care is rationed based on income: if you have the money you get it, if you don't, you won't.

This is Not how it is done in most developed countries. Almost all developed countries in the world provide some form of Universal health care.

Universal health care means that all residents of a country have access to health care regardless of income level.

According to a study published by the Institute of Medicine, approximately 18000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance.

In 2000 the World Health Organization published a report assessing the Worlds health Systems. Did you know that the U.S. ranks 37th out of 191 countries? That's below Saudi Arabia, Columbia, Singapore and Morocco to name a few.

Here is a quote from the report:
"The impact of failures in health systems is most severe on the poor everywhere, who are driven deeper into poverty by lack of financial protection against ill- health, the report says."

Bush passes the buck to congress

Remember when I wrote that the VA is oft touted as the best of the tax-supported/socialized health care systems?

Well, even President Bush thinks it needs a little fixing.

Check out this article published in the AJC today: Bush Asks Congress to Fix VA System