A short story in the Reading Eagle on Monday suggests the local newspaper is out of touch with health care for the poor in Reading.
The story was about the Daniel Torres Hispanic Center in Reading, giving its 2014 Amigo Award to Reading Health System [formerly known as Reading Hospital].
The story said that Michael Toledo, the center’s executive director, praised the hospital's Reading Health Dispensary at the Berks Community Health Center at 838 Penn St.
Don’t the writer and editors know that Reading Hospital shed the downtown dispensary in June 2012?
If I’m wrong, or if the hospital has taken an interest since, I must have missed it. I could find nothing to such effect in the hospital’s or newspaper’s public archives. So as far as I know and could find out on each organization’s websites, the Reading Health System does not have a dispensary at the health center.
In fact the Reading Hospital tossed the dispensary it did have there to the brand-new health center, mentioning it lost $3 million a year there, pretty much wiping its hands of providing care in the city.
A young woman from Reading told me that she was diagnosed with a thyroid problem in May. A mother in her 20s, she is suffering mood swings, hot flashes, nervousness, hair falling out. Her doctor gave her blood tests, which confirmed it. But treatment can’t start until she sees an endocrinologist. The next appointment available under her Medicare coverage? Oct. 16. The woman is frantic.
Many poor people tell me that when their children are sick, they head straight for Reading Health System’s emergency department. It’s easier and more convenient – sitting in an ER with a distressed child! – than getting an appointment with a doctor, they tell me.
I don’t know anything about health care finance or providing health care to poor people, but I like to ask questions. For example, why can’t Reading Health System peel off, say, $5 million from the $350 million it plans to spend on a surgical center in West Reading and donate it to the health center in downtown Reading so that poor people who are doing all the right things don’t have to wait months to get routine but vital treatments?
Or how about a million to pay some energetic young Spanish-speakers to explain to poor people waiting around the ER how it really is better to go to a family doctor?
Attracting surgeons and keeping Berks Countians in Berks for their surgeries are undeniably economic developments. But better attending to the more-routine needs of all our human capital would go further to improve life in Berks.
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