[Mb-civic] Healthcare swept away - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Healthcare swept away

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  September 21, 2005

ONE OF THE most sordid stories to come out of New Orleans after 
Hurricane Katrina was the discovery of 154 bodies in hospitals and 
nursing homes. They account for 21 percent of the currently counted 
fatalities in Louisiana. Despite the heroism of doctors and nurses, The 
New York Times wrote, ''the collapse of one of society's most basic 
covenants -- to care for the helpless -- suggests that the elderly and 
critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity 
engulfed New Orleans."

The Washington Post wrote of Rosalie Guidry Daste, a 100-year-old woman 
who ''survived five days trapped on the suffocating second floor of a 
flooded New Orleans nursing home, only to die soon after she was rescued 
and airlifted to a hospital." Saving patients became a race against 
class divisions. For-profit nursing homes and hospitals largely were 
able to marshal ambulances, buses, and helicopters to evacuate patients.

But the blundering of local, state, and federal governments thrust 
doctors and nurses at the poorest public hospitals into a battle in 
putrid conditions to save patients. Dwayne Thomas, the head of Charity 
and University public hospitals, told the Times that it was ''as close 
as I've gotten to the Third World." He said that the Louisiana 
Legislature for years ignored his requests for $8 million to prepare for 
hurricanes. His chief of intensive care, Ben deBoisblanc, who vented 
outrage in the Houston Chronicle about how helicopters ignored his 
patients, said, ''It's a travesty how this hospital for indigents was 
being treated."

As dramatic and singularly horrible as this all seems, the ultimate 
travesty is that what happened to Charity Hospital is merely symbolic of 
a slow drowning of America's healthcare. Just like the $8 million that 
was denied to Charity year after year for preventive measures against 
natural disaster, we remain in a midst of a national healthcare crisis 
that continues to worsen by the day. Just before Katrina blew apart the 
Gulf Coast, the Census Bureau released its latest numbers on Americans 
without health insurance. Despite five years of the Bush White House 
talking about how tax cuts would benefit all Americans, there was no 
change in real median income. Both the number and percentage of 
Americans in poverty increased. There was no change in the 15.7 percent 
of Americans without health insurance, but with population growth, the 
actual number of people without health insurance climbed to record heights.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/21/healthcare_swept_away/
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