Feel good Chicago story to take a blago break: A great Chicago hospital

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* DECEMBER 12, 2008

Pursuing Charitable Mission Leaves a Hospital Struggling

By BARBARA MARTINEZ

CHICAGO -- Pa Than's chest hurt so much that friends drove him to the emergency room. The hospital they took him to that day last summer diagnosed the Burmese refugee with advanced lung cancer and gave him a prescription for hospice care.

Today, Mr. Than, who is 28 years old and speaks almost no English, is responding to a cocktail of two chemotherapy drugs and a third medicine at a different hospital -- Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago. His doctor there says the treatment may not cure him, but it should at least give him a shot at surviving another couple of years.

"A young man with a potentially treatable cancer should have the right to choose life-saving therapy," says the doctor, Pam Khosla, division head of the department of hematology and oncology at Mount Sinai.


Mount Sinai has become the medical safety net for a large segment of Chicago's destitute.

Providing all patients, rich or poor, the same standards of care is one way that Mount Sinai tries to live up to its obligations as a nonprofit hospital exempt from taxes. Located amid the blight of Chicago's West Side, Mount Sinai also tries to tackle its community's social ills.

It employs former gang members to warn children away from street violence. Two full-time employees' sole responsibility is to get neighborhood residents to quit smoking. Another group of employees is charged with monitoring teenage mothers to try to delay a second pregnancy and the downward spiral that often accompanies it.

"We can't be part of this community if we're not trying to change people's lives and make it better," says Alan H. Channing, Mount Sinai's chief executive.

While a number of nonprofit hospitals have grown into profit machines in recent years, some, like Mount Sinai, have stuck to their charitable mission but struggled financially. These institutions are usually located in inner cities and not anchored to big nonprofit systems, nor can they rely on government support the way county or state hospitals can.
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more at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122893293185295179.html

[IndyOp]

1. Every hospital should be a non-profit hospital. THINK about it -- someone is making a profit

from charging you more for health than it costs them to provide it. That is undeniably immoral.

[mucifer]

2. That's the way it was several decades ago. But, then again several decades ago

hospitals were segregated and many didn't allow Jewish doctors to practice.