Hospital

It is definitely a breath of fresh air to read Hospital. One doesn't need sixty-seven languages to recognize that someone is a human being and is equally deserving of care and treatment.I was constantly amazed by the ability of Maimonides Medical Center to adapt to the culturally diverse population that it serves while maintaining high standards as a facility and what it expects of the conduct of its employees. I was personally touched by Julie Salamon's description in Hospital:

"The hospital, by necessity and tradition, remained a demilitarized zone, where patients dragged in not just their wounds, fevers, and malfunctions but their accents and customs, their immigration and insurance problems, their feelings about being outsiders. Hope and heartache in sixty-seven languages (19)."

In class, we speak of a cultural sensitivity or awareness in a physician. It did not occur to me that a hospital would uniquely cater to its own population (eg. translators; changing all the blankets from white to cream because white is the color of death in Chinese culture). I imagined blanket doctoring in a hospital the same way as blanket medicines. Doctors in a hospital would diagnose and treat thousands of people who enter the hospital by their symptoms and prescribe them medicines or run a few tests, find out what's wrong, then discharge the patient so the hospital will profit. One would think hospitals would just keep sending patients' home, but it becomes much more complicated when that patient is an immigrant without insurance or knowledge of the English language. Can a hospital still be a well-oiled machine and treat this patient just like the others that come through their doors? I hope not.

I agree with the argument in the New York Times' article that hospitals should be tax-free because they are an important service in the community. I would not agree with mandating charity care in all hospitals. How do you require hospitals to have charity? It is difficult for all hospitals to be regulated and maintain the same standard of charity care and I think that some freedom and benefit of the doubt is necessary in order for hospitals to thrive and serve their local population.