Chicago's South Side Solution for Health Care

Michelle Obama took up the cry for health care reform in a speech on Friday. “If we want to ensure women have opportunities that they deserve, if we want women to be able to care for their families and pursue things they could never imagine, then we have to reform the system."

Women play a unique and increasingly significant role in families, she said, with eight in 10 mothers reporting they are the ones responsible for choosing their children's doctors. More than 10 percent of women in this country are caring for a sick or elderly relative”. She went on to say: “ There will always be folks who will want things to stay just the way they are," Obama said. "I am here today standing before you as the First Lady of the United States of America because you all didn't settle for the world as it is... Health care is the next step." Her commitment to the most disadvantaged among us must be the result of some change of heart since she certainly demonstrated something different while working for the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center. Shortly after Barack Obama joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, the medical center promoted Michelle Obama to vice president of community and external relations, and more than doubled her salary.

Mrs. Obama first hatched the UCMC program as the "South Side Health Collaborative. The program placed counselors in the emergency room where 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 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
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 chaired 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. Even 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" according to the Washington Post.
Even staunch Obama supporters like Toni Preckwinkle, a former teacher who represents Chicago's 4th Ward and who was an Obama delegate at the Democratic National Convention have trouble with the UCMC model. "It's hard to know whether this is motivated by the interests of the patients or by the financial interests of the medical center." Asked her personal conclusion, by the Chicago Tribune Preckwinkle paused. "They have decided they need to have as many paying patients as possible," she said. "That's all I'm going to say."
Edward Novak, president of Chicago's Sacred Heart Hospital, declined to discuss the center's initiative in particular but dismissed as "bull" attempts to justify such programs as good for patients. "What they're really saying is, 'Don't use our emergency room because it will cost us money, and we don't want the public-aid population,' " Novak said.