Both San Francisco and Atlanta are making news on the healthcare front, albeit for vastly diverging reasons. In San Fran, the city will launch its new initiative to provide health insurance coverage to the 82,000 residents who are currently without such insurance. Cities all over the country will be watching closely to see how this works out.
Meanwhile, in Hot-lanta, their public hospital system is on the verge of collapse. Remember when Philadelphia had a public hospital? It's been a long time.
You think SEPTA is the only public transit system that's having budget problems? Chicago's right there with us and they're looking for two hundred million dollars from the state.
And in New York, they share some of our difficulties with park management. There is one difference:
The report also indicated that despite budget increases in recent years, the Parks Department is not doing enough strategic planning to manage its parkland properly.
A blogging planner (as opposed to a planning blogger) coins a new term known as "brewpub regionalism" based on the experiences and teachings of Denver mayor John Hickenlooper. He also throws in a slightly more derivative term to describe regional cooperation: "no mayor left behind."
Finally, some mayoral candidates in Nashville decide to be homeless for a night. The discussion at 13th Floor, Governing.com's blog, centers on whether such stunts are useful for bringing issues in the public spotlight or self-serving, political stunts that are ultimately offensive to those who experience these problems every day. It's the same discussion that we have when people suggest that the Mayor and City Council ride SEPTA to work every day, a suggestion which I still am unsure of how I feel.
Comments (2)
I suspect if you are homeless, you:
A) don't have any pride to consider anything offensive
B)don't know it is even happening
Posted by Homeless Harry | June 28, 2007 3:43 PM
I don't know the full details of what San Francisco is doing, but the only comprehensive long term solution to the health care crisis in America is a full evaluation of over all medical costs and which ones can realistically be reduced considerably and, in some cases, eliminated entirely. Do doctors have to make so much? Do hospitals have to charge so high for the rooms they provide? And what about all these situations where doctors' bill patients for having done nothing at all? Back in the '90s, for instance, I went to Frankford Hospital for X-rays, paying for this out of pocket as it were. It took a full day. By the time it was done and I was tired and ready to head home, I was told a Dr. Reider wanted to see me in his office, told it was urgent. I went in his office and he asked me what was going on? I told him that I thought he had something to tell me in that regard. "Well, let's take a look," he said, placing my X-rays taken that day up on screen. He then asked me who my regular doctor was, and when I told him, he then left the matter at that, unable to tell me anything of any special urgency, and that was it. I went home from there, and a week or so later got a bill from this doctor for $85. But for what pray tell? And even if I had insurance at the time, or if there was some sort of government sponsored program in place to pick up such costs, again the big question is, for what???
And this sort of unnecessary, unwarranted and UN-EARNED billing goes on all the time all throughout the medical industry. And it never comes into question. My not having seen Michael Moore's latest movie as of yet I don't know if he even touched on this critical aspect, did he?
But to me that's the whole joke of the medical establishment as it is in the U.S. now. And it's a case where Philadelphia could place itself at the forefront of solving this problem by being among the first cities to address it. And it could start by making excessive, unnecessary, unwarranted and un-earned billing illegal.
Do that, and maybe in the future we wouldn't have to worry about such things as insane medical institutions -- such as the Fox Chase Cancer Center (with its having more money than God at this point) -- turning on us with the outrageously excessive money it has to its name.
Or, like idiots, we could come up with some sort of taxpayer funded healthcare program that would enable these institutions to keep on gouging the way they currently are -- as if the money they're now undeservedly getting isn't more needed elsewhere.
Posted by Steve W. | June 29, 2007 1:34 AM