Mike King

Spirit of Charity (eBook, ePUB)

Restoring the Bond Between America and Its Public Hospitals

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Most Americans have historically viewed the nation's great public hospitals - Charity, Grady, Cook County, and Parkland among them - as refuges of last resort for poor and uninsured people. But these iconic institutions - some closed, some renamed, others rebuilt -- have also served as a safety valve for the nation's highly profitable medical industrial complex. They are a key to understanding the evolution of America's $3 trillion health care system - not just for the poor, but the affluent as well, argues veteran journalist Mike King in a forthcoming new book, A Spirit of Charity: Restoring the Bond between America and Its Public Hospitals, scheduled for publication on May 31.In a country that has yet to determine whether access to basic medical care is a right or an earned privilege, America's public hospitals bear the burden of that indecision, writes King. "The historic bond between these hospitals and the governments that gave them birth is being challenged in an era of fiscal austerity and reliance on marketplace solutions to health care spending. That is especially so in those states whose hostility to the federal government has caused them to forgo billions of dollars in funding offered under the Affordable Care Act that could have provided coverage for millions of newly insured poor," King writes. The book traces the history and challenges at several large public hospitals around the country, "civic fixtures that once were the most important medical institutions in the community, but places now that Americans with good health insurance would rather avoid," the book points out. One of them, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, has earned a reputation as a great teaching hospital with a mission of caring for the urban poor that dates back to 1892. It also was a place so rife with political and financial mismanagement that it nearly had to close its doors in 2007. King, an award-winning science and medicine writer, editor and commentator, chose Grady as the primary focus of the book, he said, because its role in the community is so vital, and so misunderstood. "Upwards of 435,000 outpatients stream through Grady each year (the equivalent of every man, woman, and child who lives in the city of Atlanta), with more than 100,000 of them entering through the emergency room. Three quarters of them are black. More than half have no insurance or they are covered by the state's notoriously stingy Medicaid program. As a result, the hospital gets stuck with a bill of about $100 million a year for the charity care it provides," King writes in the book's introduction. Public hospitals around the South face similar challenges. Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital had to fend off state efforts to sell it or turn over management to a for-profit company. For-profit competitors there and elsewhere in the state are siphoning off insured trauma patients and leaving public hospitals to take care for the uninsured gunshot wound victims and others gravely injured by violence. Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas recently opened a $1.3 billion state-of-the-art replacement facility, but its future is uncertain because Texas has more uninsured residents than any other state and its leaders have refused to expand Medicaid. And while state officials often turn their backs on these facilities, the chronic disease rates in the South - particularly among minorities and the poor - are higher than any other region of the country. More recently, the South's major cities have led the nation in the rate of new cases of HIV/AIDS. Yet, these places have a remarkable ability to survive and to adapt to the marketplace changes forced upon them. Chicago's Cook County Hospital, for instance, since renamed, has combined services with local primary care clinics to better manage Medicaid patients and keep them out of the hospital. Other public hospitals are experimenting with innovative new strategies that bring them more insured patients without abandoning their mission of caring for the poor. Through an examination of their unique history and incisive analysis of policy successes and failures, A Spirit of Charity reveals the remarkable story of why public hospitals matter and why they should play a more prominent role in our public policy discussions.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Secant Publishing
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Mai 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781944962081
• Artikelnr.: 45180743

Autorenporträt

The author of A Spirit of Charity: Restoring the Bond between America and Its Public Hospitals is a veteran award-winning journalist who has specialized in coverage of medicine and health care for more than forty years. From 1972 to 1987, Mike King served as a reporter, editor, Washington correspondent, and medical writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he won awards from the National Mental Health Association, the American Heart Association, and other health groups. He was among the first Washington-based reporters to document the tobacco industry's efforts to pitch products to teenagers, young adults, and minorities. In 1987 King joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's science and medicine staff covering health disparities and policy issues at the state and national level. In 1991, he and reporter Hal Straus were the first newspaper reporters in the country to examine death rates and access to care in every county in the South, documenting large differences in health care outcomes among poor blacks in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and the Mississippi River delta region, and among poor whites in the Appalachian mountain region of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The report won numerous state and national awards as the first to use computer-generated data and mapping techniques to illustrate health disparities. In 1990, King became science and medicine editor and helped direct Journal-Constitution reporter Mike Toner's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning series about antibiotic resistance in medicine and agriculture. Later that same year, he was named metro editor, supervising the largest staff of reporters and editors at the newspaper. In his final four years at the Journal-Constitution he was a member of the newspaper's editorial board responsible for commentary on medicine and health policy issues. During this time he wrote a series of "Saving Grady" editorials - 46 over a period of eighteen months - that outlined the scope of the problem with Georgia's largest public hospital and proposed solutions, prompting an examination of the roles state and local governments should play in addressing the issue of indigent care funding at Grady. King blogs on health care news and policy issues at http://commentonhealth.com/. A Spirit of Charity is his first book. He grew up in Jeffersonville, Indiana and graduated from Indiana University Southeast with a degree in political science. He and his wife, Shereen Walls King, live in Atlanta