Avoiding the Uninsured

Avoiding the Uninsured 1.

Running head: AVOIDING THE UNINSURED

Avoiding the Uninsured How City Hospitals are Giving Up on the Poor Gerard Molnar Keller Graduate School of Management Health Service Systems HS541 Dr. Nancy Borkowski February 21, 2010

Avoiding the Uninsured 2. How City Hospitals are Giving Up on the Poor On a sunny, unseasonably warm autumn day in September of 2008, twelve individuals, seven women, five men picked up a dozen shovels in a field in New Lenox, IL and drove them into the ground. Thus the $400 million 289-bed state-of-the-art Silver Cross replacement hospital at Route 6 and Clinton Road was born. Silver Cross Hospital has, in fact been around since 1892 in nearby Joliet just five miles north up Interstate 55. At the ceremony, Dr. Daniel Gutierrez, Chairman of the Silver Cross Board of Directors used the original shovel that broke ground for the current hospital back in 1892 and in doing so he mixed Joliet soil with that of New Lenox soil forever linking the hospital’s past with that of its future (Village of New Lenox, 2008). So why would you, after serving a community for 118 years, suddenly pack up and move only five miles down the road? All the officials at the groundbreaking ceremony that day said all the right things. Silver Cross President and CEO Paul Pawlak said,

Not many hospitals have the opportunity to build a brand new facility, but Silver Cross is not like other hospitals. The culture of Silver Cross is the spirit of “can do” and this is the spirit we bring to improving the health care experience of our patients. (Village of New Lenox, 2008, p. 3)

Silver Cross Hospital’s Chief of Staff, Dr. Umesh Sharma said “We will have state-of-the-art tools at our fingertips to keep Will County healthy (Village of New Lenox, 2008, p. 3).” All those quotes for the newspaper are nice but let’s look at some numbers: The medium income for New Lenox is $83,206, the medium income for Joliet is $61,061. New Lenox is 95..6 %...