How Corporate NOLA Murdered Charity Hospital

You remember Charity Hospital, right? The public teaching hospital in New Orleans that survived Katrina thanks to the genuine heroism of employees and volunteers who kept the lights on and the patients alive and cared for.

Charity Hospital is a living, breathing testament to the power of public investment.

Or it would be, if the rethuglican corporatists running the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana and Louisiana State University hadn't deliberately killed it in order to get a private boutique clinic for billionaires built with taxpayer dollars instead.

I've been a fan of public teaching hospitals my whole life. Friends, coworkers, family members all work, teach, learn and heal in publicly-supported university teaching hospitals. They are the foundation of any community. You wanna know if a borderline neighborhood is moving up or sliding down? Look for the public hospital. It will tell you everything.

Roberta Brandes Gratz:

Before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Charity Hospital was the pride of New Orleans. A 1930s Art Deco–style icon built with WPA funds, Charity was one of the oldest continually operating public hospitals in the country and was regarded as one of the most vital and successful. “Charity was one of the best teaching hospitals in the country, where students from Tulane and LSU did their training,” says Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room physician, noting that it served 100,000 patients a year before the storm.

Today Charity is a skeleton of its former self, with smaller, temporary facilities. The interim coverage does not include “urgent and chronic outpatient care,” notes Moises, and reaches a vastly reduced patient population. Meanwhile, the money that has flowed from the state and federal governments to compensate for the storm’s damage to the hospital is set to be spent on a highly controversial new $1.2 billion complex on an entirely different site, separated from the downtown core by an interstate highway.

The abandonment of the old Charity Hospital stands as a potent symbol of the many disappointments and betrayals experienced by the residents of New Orleans after Katrina. The loss has been a huge blow to the poor African-American community Charity served—an outcome that is all the more tragic, critics say, because it didn’t have to happen.

Charity flooded only in the basement during Katrina. In an extraordinary act of dedication and volunteerism, a 200-person medical and military team brought in a 600-kilowatt generator, pumped out the water and prepared the hospital for service. It was cleaned (to a condition better than before the storm) and was “medical ready” within weeks, according to doctors and military personnel present at the cleanup, as well as Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, the retired Army general who was commander of the joint task force on Katrina.

Read the whole infuriating thing. Print it out and carry it around with you to shove down the throat of the rethuglican moron who starts braying about running government like a business.