Run on and see where it ends: Fighting to make health equality a reality AlterNet (blog)
The specific issue that community members had gathered about is this: in New York City, prominent private hospitals—facilities like New York-Presbyterian , Montefiore Medical Center , Mount Sinai —operate two different systems of care for patients with the same kinds of health problems but with different types of insurance. There are, for example, cardiology “clinics” for patients with Medicaid, a public insurance program, and there are cardiology “faculty practices” for patients with private insurance. Sometimes the clinics are right next door to the faculty practices, but Medicaid patients won’t be allowed into the faculty practices, and privately insured patients are not sent to the clinics.
What is more, the hospitals allow valuable and finite resources to be allocated unequally between the two systems of care. For instance, clinics often do not have enough financial support from the hospital to perform basic care coordination tasks like sending notes back to the patient’s primary care physicians, while faculty practices often receive administrative and other forms of support so that such tasks are routinely able to be done.
