The Helping Profession: Only If You've Got the Bucks

Special Report: Hospitals, doctors moving out of poor city neighborhoods to more affluent areas. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 6/18/2014)

Movin' to the 'burbs.   A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of data from the largest U.S. metropolitan areas shows that people in poor neighborhoods are less healthy than their more affluent neighbors, but more likely to live in areas with physician shortages and closed hospitals. 

At a time when research shows that being poor is highly correlated with poor health, hospitals and doctors are following privately insured patients to more affluent areas rather than remaining anchored in communities with the greatest health care needs.

This is nothing new, folks.  "The Shame of American Medicine".  The New York Review of Books, 5/26/1966.

I remember these news stories.  It was how I learned about the Mayo Clinic..   It has left us in an extremely unfortunate mess. At its best American medicine may very well be the best in the world, as its practitioners claim, which is why retired English kings and Arabian sheiks turn up regularly in our hospitals. But though excellent treatment is usually available to the very rich, the rest of the population finds even adequate services hard to come by.