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March 03, 2009
Michelle Obama's Patient-Dumping Scheme
Michelle Obama's Patient-Dumping Scheme
By David Catron
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, which reported 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?
Wild Thing's comment.........
Michelle, shame on you. I thought you were for your people. Wouldn’t a university hospital be a teaching hospital and take all people?
Michelle O. is not my First Lady of our country. Looking back, “America is down-right mean” and “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country.” and then of couse this $300+ thousand job was created just for her. LOL And then this job was quietly eliminated when her husband Barack Hussein Obama became President. It's the Chicago Way, cushy no-show jobs in exchange for political patronage...fist bump.
....Thank you Mark for sending this to me.
Mark
3rd Mar.Div. 1st Battalion 9th Marine Regiment
1/9 Marines aka The Walking Dead
VN 66-67
Posted by Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 05:45 AM
Comments
A good reminder. I also previously posted on this. That job must have been really needed to create it for the First ShadY MamaBama and then let it go away.
Bob A.
Posted by: Bob A at March 3, 2009 06:45 AM
Michelle had such an important job at the hospital that her salary more than doubled after her husband got elected to the senate. This job is so important that they haven't gotten anybody to fill it.
Posted by: BobF at March 3, 2009 10:27 AM
Out here, that is where the less affluent go--But all hospitals in my town accept anyone, whether they have medicare, no insurance or the best insurance around. Our doctors believe in "first do no harm." The only time a patient would be transferred is if the hospital they're in doesn't have the correct facilities/physicians for a procedure or if it's trauma, to get them to the hospital best suited for that trauma. We don't believe in "patient dumping." Michelle Obama ought to be ashamed of herself and the families of those who died while she was in command ought to turn around and sue her personally because it was her decision to break the law in the first place!
Posted by: Lynn at March 3, 2009 11:02 AM
She's this guy's
monkeywtfat3.jpg">kissin' cuzzin's, as you can see she has a lot in common with Al Franken too.
This is no different than that incompetent
notorious_murders/angels/dr_jayant_patel/2.html">Jayant Patel, the AMA let him get away with murder too. Soon it will be the law of the land, Oregon and today Washington are legalizing 'assisted suicide', eh, euthanasia anyone???
Posted by: Jack at March 3, 2009 12:20 PM
God that picture reminds me of the bouncing dog head that people used to put in their vehicle's rear window!!!
And Jack......wasn't that what they put Kevorkian in prison for? "He is most noted for publicly championing a terminal patient's right to die via euthanasia; he claims to have assisted at least 130 patients to that end."
Sounds to me like a whole lot of "killers" (masquerading as medical health advisors) need to be prosecuted and sent to Alcatraz!! No need to fix up the old prison.....just send them there as it exists today. It would be sweet justice for them to have to live their last days in that kind of environment. Shark Bait!!!!!!
Posted by: John at March 3, 2009 12:38 PM
You are right John, however Kevorkian wasn't part of either of their Patronage systems!!!
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/norman_thomas_quote_ffb1
Michelle and her position were nothing short of the classical money laundering scheme used by thugs throughout the world to legitimize their crimes, she was Barack's kickback wide receiver.
Posted by: Jack at March 3, 2009 04:24 PM
Bob A., your right, haha she sure did not mind the handout job. Then she goes and tells all of us how we have to sacrifice etc. What a phony.
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 06:31 PM
BobF, yes and they even got rid of the job. hahahaa And they didn't think we would notice heh heh God bless the internet.
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 06:33 PM
Lynn, I wonder if this happens in other big cities, like New York.
Like you said that kind of thing does not happen where you are and it didn't where we used to live either.
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 06:36 PM
Jack, hahaha that photo.
"euthanasia anyone"....I'll take a pass on that solution.
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 06:40 PM
John, LOL the bouncing dog head. hahahahahaha
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 3, 2009 06:43 PM
So is Axelrod banging that black skank bag?
Posted by: cuchieddie-25th ID Vet at March 3, 2009 07:32 PM
