Microsoft Word - obio-MS-fin.doc

(Nandana) #1
428 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

(^20) See Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive press,
2005ff.).
(^21) Hyde Park Herald, September 19, 2008, cited by Ryan Lizza, “Making It,” New Yorker, July 21, 2008,
emphasis added.
(^22) Incredibly enough, historian Herbert Parmet wrote of Richard Nixon that “It would do a great injustice to
deny [Nixon’s] intellectual and spiritual commitment to racial equality.” As Michael Lind comments, “In fact,
Nixon’s purpose in reviving and implementing the Philadelphia Plan was to split the Democratic coalition by
pitting white labor against the black civil rights movement.” See Lind, Up From Conservatism (New York:
The Free Press, 1996), p. 192.
(^23) See my Obama: The Postmodern Coup (2008).
(^24) According to a recent Washington Post account, ‘A few years ago, executives at the prestigious University
of Chicago Medical Center were concerned that an increasing number of patients were arriving at their
emergency room with what the executives considered to be non-urgent complaints. The visits were costly to
the hospital, and many of the patients, coming from the surrounding South Side neighborhood, were poor and
uninsured. Michelle Obama, an executive at the medical center, launched an innovative program to steer the
patients to existing neighborhood clinics to deal with their health needs. That effort, in time, inspired a
broader program the hospital now calls its Urban Health Initiative. To ensure community support, Michelle
Obama and others in late 2006 recommended that the hospital hire the firm of David Axelrod, who a few
months later became the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. ... Axelrod’s firm warned
hospital executives in its May 2007 presentation that, although many people welcomed the initiative, primary-
care doctors opposed it as a break with the center’s commitment to the community. Opinion research showed
that a small but passionate group of people already considered the hospital to be elitist, arrogant and lacking
in “cultural empathy” for the surrounding economically depressed South Side neighborhood, according to a
draft report obtained by The Washington Post. Some doctors in focus groups dismissed local health clinics as
“wholly inadequate.” Quentin Young, a local physician whose five-doctor medical office lists Barack Obama
among its patients, said that in past decades the South Side often viewed the institution as a “citadel of
exclusion,” more interested in research than the well-being of its neighbors. ...The hospital told state
regulators it spent $10 million on charity care for the poor in fiscal 2007 -- 1.3 percent of its total hospital
expenses, according to an analysis performed for The Washington Post by the bipartisan, nonprofit Center for
Tax and Budget Accountability. That is below the 2.1 percent average for nonprofit hospitals in Cook County.
As a nonprofit, the University of Chicago Medical Center receives annual tax breaks worth nearly five times
as much as it spends on charity care, the analysis found. Still, Quentin Young, the South Side physician,
described the medical center’s level of charity spending as “ludicrous.” Young, known in Chicago for having
been the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, is chairman of the Health and Medicine Policy
Research Group, a Chicago-based nonprofit that advocates health-care reform. Young considered himself an
ally of Barack Obama while he was a state legislator. “That’s shameful,” Young said of the percentages.
“They are arguably, if not defrauding, then at least taking advantage of a public subsidy. We would like to see
them give more than the minimum. The need is there.” [A] hospital report quotes Michelle Obama as saying,
“The world is seeping in, and our salvation will be the success of our partners” at local clinics.... Edward
Novak, president of Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital, declined to discuss the center’s initiative in particular
but dismissed as “bull” attempts to justify such programs as good for patients. “What they’re really saying is,
‘Don’t use our emergency room because it will cost us money, and we don’t want the public-aid population,’
“ Novak said. An April 2007 draft report from the medical center’s polling firm, Peter D. Hart Research
Associates, said focus groups suggested that “enough latent suspicion toward the hospital and university as
elitist exists to ensure that a political attack against the Urban Health Initiative as deceptive and self-serving
would find fertile ground.” While most of those surveyed expressed favorable views of the center and its
program, critics complained of arrogance and a lack of empathy, the report said. “More than a few staff
members -- particularly medical staff -- express strongly worded concern or disappointment with UCMC in its
commitment to the community,” the report said. ... “This new health initiative is not really about helping the

Free download pdf