Not long ago I was hospitalized for ten days. Insurance paid for most of my expenses. The doctors, nurses and facilities were outstanding, as were my posthospitalization follow-ups by visiting RNs.
Now compare my experience with Dr. David Ansell’s. In his book, ‘County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital’ (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2011), he writes about the seventeen years he worked at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a safety-net hospital dubbed ‘County’ by the poor and largely uninsured people of color it served.
It had once been praised for establishing the nation’s first blood bank and trauma unit. By 1995, however, when Ansell left, it had become a dumping ground for the poorest of the poor, as he describes it in his gripping, angry and ultimately very sad chronicle.
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