Hospital in Atlanta on Point of Collapse

The Negro-run Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta has served as the first place of healthcare for generations of Negro violence in that city, from victims of stabbings and shootings, and motorists grievously injured in Atlanta’s murderous rush-hour traffic.
Now, Grady itself is in grave condition. Staggering under a deficit projected at $55 million, the city’s only public hospital could close at the end of the year, leaving Atlanta without a major trauma center and foisting thousands of Negroes onto emergency rooms at other hospitals for their routine medical care.
A proposed switch to a nonprofit governing board is being opposed by the hospital’s Negro board. They say that the hospital “would be less committed to the poor, and that the board would go from mostly black to mostly white.”
Sen. Vincent Fort, a Negro Democrat from Atlanta, said that Grady is “absolutely critical” to the city’s black poor. And he charged that Atlanta’s “white power structure” including the business leaders and politicians who are pushing for the nonprofit board is trying to orchestrate a takeover.

“I don’t have the words to describe the onslaught of health care needs that will hit the region if Grady were to close,” said Dr. Katherine Heilpern, chief of emergency medicine at the Emory University medical school, which uses Grady as a teaching hospital and supplies many of its physicians. “This is a huge deal. We may literally have people’s lives at stake if the Grady Health System fails and spirals down into financial insolvency.”
Founded in 1892, Grady has struggled financially for years. But now it has reached a crisis because of rising health care costs, dwindling government aid, a lack of paying customers, and years of neglect, a situation not uncommon among urban hospitals like Grady that primarily serve the needy.
The loss of Grady would be unconscionable to many political and civic leaders in this metropolitan area of 5 million people. The overwhelming majority of the 900,000 patients treated at Grady each year are poor and black, and the institution is considered a vital part of Atlanta’s black community.
But “To the extent that you have African American doctors, nurses and other professionals operating a big-city hospital and taking care of black people, that is a source of pride in the black community,” Fort said. “So there is a great deal of skepticism that the Chamber of Commerce is interested in Grady. There are some of us who believe that is a self-interest.”
Only 7 percent of Grady’s patients have private insurance, and 75 percent are on Medicaid. Because they lack insurance and have no family doctor, many go to Grady’s emergency room even when they don’t have an emergency. The ER ends up treating sore throats and other ordinary aches and pains.
Other public hospitals that have been in distress in recent years include D.C. General Hospital in Washington, which in 2001 stopped taking inpatients, and Martin Luther King Jr.-Charles Drew Hospital, which was built in Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts riots. The hospital lost its government accreditation last summer because of shoddy care and closed its trauma center.
All of these disasters were also Negro-run.

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