Atlanta’s public hospital in critical condition, may close
ATLANTA — For generations, Grady Memorial Hospital has treated the poorest of the poor. Now, staggering under a deficit projected at $55 million, Atlanta’s only public hospital could close at the end of the year, leaving the city without a major trauma center and sending thousands of poor people elsewhere for routine medical care.
Like some other urban hospitals across the United States that primarily serve the needy, Grady has reached a crisis because of rising health care costs, dwindling government aid, a lack of paying customers and years of neglect.
“I don’t have the words to describe the onslaught of health care needs that will hit the region if Grady were to close,” said Dr. Katherine Heilpern, chief of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, which uses Grady as a teaching hospital and supplies many of its doctors. “We may literally have people’s lives at stake if the Grady Health System fails and spirals down into financial insolvency.”
The majority of the 900,000 patients treated at Grady each year are poor and black, and the institution is considered a vital part of Atlanta’s black community. It accepts all patients, no matter their ability to pay.
Grady’s board of trustees last Monday unanimously agreed to establish a nonprofit governing board intended to attract $300 million in immediate and long-term funding from the city’s business, philanthropic and government communities, as well as from the state.
But some fear that after the switch to a nonprofit governing board the hospital will be less committed to the poor, and that the board will go from mostly black to mostly white. Grady has been run by a board whose members are appointed by politicians in Fulton and DeKalb counties.
In addition to losing money on patient care, Grady needs an estimated $300 million to repair and modernize its buildings and acquire new equipment, such as CT scanners and an up-to-date computer system. The hospital has 953 beds and 5,000 employees.
Changes at the hospital affect the entire state of Georgia. Grady is the only hospital in a 100-mile radius of Atlanta that has a Level 1 trauma center, capable of treating the most serious injuries.
It has the state’s only poison control center, obstetrics intensive care unit and comprehensive sickle cell center. And the city’s emergency command center for handling plane crashes and terrorist attacks is based there.
“It will be a sad day for Atlanta if Grady closes. If people realized the benefits Grady provides, closure would not be on the table,” said Dr. Marsha Regenstein, a health policy professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Police restore calm to Paris suburbs after nights of rioting
VILLIERS-LE-BEL, France — Vast deployments of riot police restored calm to the troubled suburbs of northern Paris, with only scattered cases of arson reported last Thursday following nights of rioting.
A few cars and garbage cans were set on fire in the Val-d’Oise region north of Paris, but police made only a handful of arrests and there were no attacks on officers, a local government spokeswoman said.
“It really is getting calmer and calmer,” she said. She refused to be identified by name, in line with her department’s policy. “We are returning little by little to normal.”
The government deployed riot officers to the worst-hit town, Villiers-le-Bel, again last Wednesday night after President Nicolas Sarkozy promised tough punishment for rioters who fired at police with shotguns earlier in the week. He said they would be prosecuted for attempted murder.
The riots were triggered by the Nov. 25 deaths of two teenage boys in a motorbike crash with a police car in Villiers-le-Bel. Some residents refused to believe the deaths were accidental, blaming the police.
The violence peaked the following night, echoing riots that raged through impoverished suburbs nationwide for three weeks in 2005.
The unrest showed that anger still simmers in the housing projects where many Arabs, blacks and other minorities live, often isolated from mainstream society.
Successive governments have struggled with the question of how to integrate minority youths from poor neighborhoods. Heavy state investment has done little to improve housing and create jobs in the depressed projects that ring Paris.
The government’s newest plan — an “equal opportunities” bill to improve the prospects of those in poor suburbs — will be unveiled Jan. 22.
Report: FBI will not reopen S.C. civil rights case
COLUMBIA, South Carolina — The FBI will not reinvestigate the deaths of three black men killed during a civil rights protest in 1968 because the state troopers involved were acquitted of all charges nearly 40 years ago, according to a report published online.
The FBI was considering whether to review the shootings known as the Orangeburg Massacre as part of its examination of a number of civil rights-era cases across the South.
The FBI decided not to proceed with another investigation of the shootings because it would violate constitutional protections against double jeopardy, Denise Taiste, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s South Carolina office, told The Greenville, S.C., News.
“Right now it doesn’t look like they are going to reopen the matter,” Taiste told the newspaper.
On Feb. 8, 1968, three civil rights demonstrators were killed and 27 wounded at the historically black college, now South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg. The shootings were the culmination of several days of protest because blacks were not allowed at a local bowling alley.
State charges were never filed in the case, but an FBI probe at the time led to charges against nine troopers. When a federal grand jury refused to indict the troopers, prosecutors decided to try them anyway on a charge of imposing summary punishment without due process of law.
A jury of 10 whites and two blacks acquitted all the defendants a little over a year later, finding they acted in self-defense.
