A few years ago, executives at the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center were concerned that an increasing number of patients were arriving at their emergency room with what the executives considered to be non-urgent complaints. The visits were costly to the hospital, and many of the patients, coming from the surrounding South Side neighborhood, were poor and uninsured.
Michelle Obama, an executive at the medical center, launched an innovative program to steer the patients to existing neighborhood clinics to deal with their health needs.
That effort, in time, inspired a broader program the hospital now calls its Urban Health Initiative. To ensure community support, Michelle Obama and others in late 2006 recommended that the hospital hire the firm of David Axelrod, who a few months later became the chief strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
One key recommendation from Axelrod's firm: "Respond quickly to opposition activity."
The medical center's initiative provides a window into the close relationship between the Obamas, their associates at the University of Chicago and Axelrod, the strategist most central to Barack Obama's rise. It also illustrates how that circle, and particularly Michelle, dealt with an intractable social problem that confronts many urban areas: How much care should large, nonprofit hospitals offer the poor in return for tax-exempt status?
Axelrod's firm warned hospital executives in its May 2007 presentation that, although many people welcomed the initiative, primary-care doctors opposed it as a break with the center's commitment to the community. Opinion research showed that a small but passionate group of people already considered the hospital to be elitist, arrogant and lacking in "cultural empathy" for the surrounding economically depressed South Side neighborhood, according to a draft report obtained by The Washington Post. Some doctors in focus groups dismissed local health clinics as "wholly inadequate."
One of the suggestions from Axelrod's firm: Change the name of the initiative.
"Internal and external respondents expressed the opinion that the word 'urban' is code for 'black' or 'black and poor,' " according to a report the firm gave the medical center on May 14, 2007. "Based on the research, consideration should be given to re-branding the initiative."
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. She is now on leave from the $317,000-a-year post, in which she sought to bridge the gap between the wealthy institution and its poorer neighbors. The hospital declined to discuss the budget for her program or her input into budgetary decisions.
The vast majority of political contributions from university employees have gone to Democrats, and over the past nine years they have donated at least $373,000 to Barack Obama's campaigns, records show. The university's executive suites are home to a number of the couple's closest friends and financial backers.
The medical center's chairwoman, Valerie Jarrett, is a close friend and top adviser who travels frequently with Barack Obama. One of Barack's best friends, Eric Whitaker, is executive vice president at the center and is now in charge of the Urban Health Initiative. Hospital board member Kelly R. Welsh is executive vice president atNorthern Trust Co., which extended the couple a $1.3 million home mortgage shortly after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. Dan Shomon, Barack Obama's former campaign manager, is a university lobbyist. Jarrett, Whitaker, Welsh and Shomon all declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests.
The 600-bed medical center, which has a $1.3 billion budget, has more than 700 attending physicians. The hospital is a leader in such specialties as cancer care and organ transplants, and boasts that patients travel from around the world for treatment. Its facilities feature valet parking, a meditation garden and, in some rooms, 42-inch flat-panel televisions.
Quentin Young, a local physician whose five-doctor medical office lists Barack Obama among its patients, said that in past decades the South Side often viewed the institution as a "citadel of exclusion," more interested in research than the well-being of its Niehbors
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The hospital report quotes Michelle Obama as saying, "The world is seeping in, and our salvation will be the success of our partners" at local clinics.
Obama's program has enjoyed favorable news media coverage in Chicago and was eventually expanded into a broader program, the Urban Health Initiative. Under the effort, the hospital has started providing selected clinics with part-time medical personnel and has given $350,000 to enable a nearby clinic to nearly double in size.
Center executives said the initiative, on which they spent $2 million last year, could be a national model. Critics, however, describe the program as an attempt to ensure that the hospital retains only affluent patients with insurance.
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
Yeah, she really looks like a saint now doesn't she?
You can read the entire story over at the Washington Post.
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