Sen. Joe Lieberman served notice this week that he'll be shilling for insurance companies headquartered in Connecticut by joining the GOP in filibustering any bill that has a public option. A public option is a nonstarter for Lieberman, and keeping him in the Democratic fold is one of the many challenges facing Majority Leader Harry Reid as he moves the health-care-reform bill toward the Senate floor. Amid the birth pangs of health-care legislation will be wails about how we're destroying the best health care in the world. This is a myth that critics of reform perpetuate, that government-run health care will be the equivalent of turning doctors' offices into the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Click here to follow Eleanor Clift).
It's true we have the best care for people who can afford it, but we also have large populations that are underserved in urban and rural America. For example, there is just one hospital in South-Central Los Angeles, home to 1.6 million people. South L.A.'s available medical care is more comparable to Bangladesh, a Third World country, than to the rest of California, which has five times as many primary-care doctors per 100,000 people as this densely populated and poor section of Los Angeles. In some suburbs, not 10 miles away, there are hundreds of physicians per 100,000 people. "The differences are appalling," says Susan Kelly, former president of Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, which is located in the heart of the South-Central L.A. community.
Kelly came to CDU with fresh eyes. She is from Australia (and is now a dual citizen), and when she took the job, she was the first female, the first non-physician (she has a Ph.D. in psychology), and the first non-African-American to lead Charles Drew, the nation's only dually designated Historically Black Graduate Institution and Hispanic Serving Health Professions School. CDU was chartered as a private, nonprofit institution in 1966, one of the good things to come out of the Watts riots that awakened the country to the disparity of services in South-Central L.A. and seeded social reform. She remains shocked at the conditions that prevail in the community, where education, housing, and transportation are all subpar.
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