Ford's blog: "Understanding Me"

The
First Lady helped create a notorious program that dumped poor patients 
on community hospitals, yet the national media ignore the story. Imagine
if her husband were a Republican.

The University of Chicago 
Medical Center has received a good deal of justly opprobrious press over
its policy of "redirecting" low-income patients to community hospitals 
while reserving its own beds for well-heeled patients requiring highly 
profitable procedures. Substantial coverage was given to a recent 
indictment of the program by the American College of Emergency 
Physicians. ACEP's president, Dr. Nick Jouriles, released a statement
suggesting that the initiative comes "dangerously close to ‘patient 
dumping,' a practice made illegal by the Emergency Medical Labor and 
Treatment Act, and reflected an effort to ‘cherry pick' wealthy patients
over poor." 

Oddly
absent from most of the unflattering press coverage of UCMC's 
patient-dumping scheme is any mention of the role our new First Lady 
played in devising the program. A laudable exception has been the Chicago Sun-Times, whichreported
last August that "Michelle Obama -- currently on unpaid leave from her 
$317,000-a-year job as a vice president of the prestigious hospital -- 
helped create the program." 
On
the rare occasions when other "news" media have bothered to connect the
Urban Health Initiative to its glamorous creator, they have attempted 
to whitewash this tawdry program. Typical of such disingenuous coverage 
was a story in the Washington Post, which described it as "an innovative program to steer the patients to existing neighborhood clinics."
But
no amount of journalistic lipstick can hide the reality that Mrs. 
Obama's initiative is a patient-dumping scheme. Such "cherry-picking," 
as Dr. Jouriles accurately describes it, was, at one time, fairly 
common. Prestigious institutions like the University of Chicago Medical 
Center routinely "dumped" Medicaid, uninsured and other unprofitable 
patients on less mercenary community hospitals. Many patients suffered 
needlessly, and more than a few actually died, as the result of this 
practice. So, in 1986, President Reagan signed the Emergency Medical 
Labor and Treatment Act (EMTALA) into law. EMTALA made such 
"redirection" illegal, but many high profile hospitals still chafed at 
being forced to treat poor patients. Enter Michelle Obama, UCMC's "Vice 
President for Community and External Affairs."
Mrs.
Obama first hatched the UCMC program as the "South Side Health 
Collaborative," which featured a gang of "counselors" whose job it was 
to "advise" low-income patients that they would be better off at other 
hospitals and clinics. The program was so successful in getting rid of 
unwanted patients that she expanded it, gave it a new name, and hired 
none other than David Axelrod to sell the program to the public. 
According to the Sun-Times, "Obama's wife and Valerie Jarrett, 
an Obama friend and adviser who chairs the medical center's board, 
backed the Axelrod firm's hiring." Axelrod helped the future First Lady
formulate a public relations campaign in which the "Urban Health 
Initiative" was represented as a boon to the community actuated by the 
purest of altruistic motives.
The
resultant PR campaign was a study in Orwellian audacity. Chicago's 
inner city residents soon began hearing that UCMC's patient dumping 
program would "dramatically improve health care for thousands of South 
Side residents" and that the medical center was generously willing to 
provide "a ride on a shuttle bus to other centers." Likewise, the people
who ran the community hospitals to which these unwanted patients were 
being shuttled began to read claims in local media to the effect that 
the Urban Health Initiative was good for them as well. Dr. Eric 
Whitaker, the Blagojevich crony who succeeded Mrs. Obama as Director of 
the program, repeatedly assured gullible reporters that the financial 
impact on these hospitals would be positive: "The initiative actually is
improving their bottom lines." The CFOs of those hospitals were no 
doubt relieved to learn that treating Medicaid and uninsured patients is
profitable.
But you just can't please some people. In one of the few frank passages of the Post
article, we discover that many members of UCMC's medical staff believe 
the program is nothing more than an "attempt to ensure that the hospital
retains only affluent patients with insurance." And another association
of emergency physicians has joined ACEP in denouncing the Urban Health 
Initiative. The Chicago Tribune reports
that Dr. Larry Weiss, president of the American Academy of Emergency 
Medicine is unhappy about UCMC's failure to consult its own ER 
physicians before initiating the program: "Not including emergency-room 
physicians ... would be analogous to changing the way surgery is 
performed in an operating room without involving any surgeons." Dr. 
Whitaker assures us, however, that such critics are merely "opposed to 
change."
Presumably,
he would be similarly dismissive of Angela Adams, who brought her son 
to the medical center's ER after his lip had been partially torn off by a
pit bull. As the Tribune puts it,
"Instead of rushing Dontae into surgery ... the hospital's staff began 
pressing her about insurance." Unfortunately for Dontae, he was covered 
by Medicaid. So, all he got from the UCMC emergency department was a 
shot, some antibiotics, and instructions to "follow up with Cook 
County." Angela had to take her son across town to John Stroger 
Hospital, where he was immediately admitted for reconstructive surgery. 
Like doctors Jouriles and Weiss, Angela is having trouble seeing the 
community benefit of the Urban Health Initiative.
Meanwhile,
the program's parents, Michelle Obama and David Axelrod, have moved to 
Washington. As the First Lady and the President's closest advisor, they 
wield enormous power. Indeed, they may be the most powerful people in 
the Obama Administration, aside from the President himself. If these two
characters were willing to betray their Chicago neighbors -- the South 
Side's most vulnerable citizens -- with a disgraceful program like the 
Urban Health Initiative, what sort of mischief will they devise for the 
hapless denizens of flyover country? 
Come
to think of it, isn't Obamacare being sold to us in pretty much the 
same way the Urban Health Initiative was sold to Chicago?
David
Catron is a health care finance professional who has spent more than 
twenty years working for and advising hospitals and medical practices. 
He blogs at Health Care BS.







on "Michelle Obama's Patient-Dumping Scheme"

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/michelle_obamas_patientdumping_1.html