Chicago Daily Observer

Three days after the Cook County Health and Hospitals System publicly debated and passed a “billion-dollar budget,” it continued Monday to refuse to present the document to the public.

The failure to produce the document also comes three days after Cook County Chief Financial Officer Donna Dunnings promised a reporter the document would be produced Monday.

Bravo for a new Illinois law that protects you from discrimination by employers and insurers for illness and defects that genetic testing might turn up.

If, for example, sophisticated genetic testing shows that you are a likely candidate for a heart attack or breast cancer, you can’t be denied health insurance or have your premiums raised.

These protections join the many anti-discrimination laws and regulations, some warranted, others not. But this is certainly a worthy one. In this, I’m with so-called progressives, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, that support the protections.

But I wonder if progressives are with me when it comes to protecting people whose genetic diseases are turned up by sophisticated testing before they are born. Especially against discrimination of the ultimate kind by the parents, who don’t want to put up with having a “special needs child,” such as one with Down syndrome. About 90 ... Read More...

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.

Let’s assume everything is on the square at the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board.

OK. Forget about the fixing of the new hospital that Wisconsin’s Mercy Health Care System wanted to build in Crystal Lake to compete with local biggie Centegra Health Care System’s dominant hospitals in McHenry County.

Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed a new board, didn’t he?

Problem solved, right?

No reason to be suspicious when Naperville’s Edward Hospital gets turned down for the third time, right?

The Senate Ethics Committee has told Republican Sen. Tom Coburn that he’ll be engaged in a “serious violation of Senate rules” if he continues delivering babies back home in Oklahoma.

Coburn’s response: So what?

“On my own time, I’m taking care of women who have a need, and I’m going to continue to deliver babies,” Coburn, an obstetrician, told Politico. “I’m not going to stop.”

Last February, Northern Illinois University won state permission to build an expensive and advanced proton-therapy cancer-treatment center in the suburb of West Chicago. It would be the first such facility in Illinois, joining five other centers in the nation.

But it won’t be the last: Proton therapy has a bright future. Doctors say it’s often superior to X-ray treatment: Its energy can be more finely focused on a cancerous tumor, sparing surrounding tissue to a significant degree. So far, it’s been used most often on children and patients with brain tumors.The promise of proton therapy explains why several more centers are in planning or construction stages nationwide—including one proposed by Central DuPage Hospital for Warrenville, about six miles from the NIU facility.

And that’s too close, according to the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. In April, the board issued a preliminary rejection of Central DuPage’s plan to build.

Recently there have been some unfortunate misconceptions reported regarding the state-of-the-art Northern Illinois Proton Treatment and Research Center. In order to shed some light on this important project, which will bring cutting-edge medical treatment not only to DuPage County but to the region as a whole, we felt it was important to set the record straight.

The development of the Proton Center was born out of support forged between Northern Illinois University, Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, DuPage County, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory plus state and congressional leaders. With only five such centers in existence throughout the United States, we have been very fortunate to have Northern Illinois University’s leadership and experience in physics and neutron cancer therapy (NIU has operated the NIU Institute for Neutron Therapy at Fermilab since 2004) guiding us throughout this process.

I attended an interesting presentation earlier this summer by a group of local Doctors interested in starting a Proton Therapy Center for cancer treatment. The logic proceeded that Protons used for radiation treatment can be more concentrated and stable than the current common treatment of X-Ray Radiation. The precise targeting of the dosage is more directed at the cancerous cells has less side effects on healthy cells, and can be given in higher volumes without additional harm to the patient.

Sounds plausible enough to me, but the treatment centers have been quite expensive, $100 Million in some cases, and require a very long term outlook to achieve profitability. So it is really good news from Madsion that researchers at the University of Wisconsin have made some developments getting the price down to $20 Million. Lower delivery costs, more effective treatment, healthier patients, less pain and suffering…who could argue with that?

Q: If socialized medicine is so bad, why are infant mortality rates higher in the U.S. than in other developed nations with government or single-payer health care?

A: U.S. infant mortality rates (deaths of infants <1 year of age per 1,000 live births) are sometimes cited as evidence of the failings of the U.S. system of health care delivery. Universal health care, it’s argued, is why babies do better in countries with socialized medicine.

But in fact, the main factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and prematurity. The way that these factors are reported — and how such babies are treated statistically — tells a different story than what the numbers reveal.

“Mom, Dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins sobbed in private, but made it through the Thanksgiving weekend without letting vivacious, popular, smart-as-a-whip, 6-year-old Zach know about the incurable, neurodegenerative disease he has, or the cruel expectation that it will cripple him before it kills him.”

So began a November 2001 article by Daily Herald columnist Burt Constable. The article went on to say:

“All Zach knows is that he isn’t as good at playing goalie as some kids on his soccer team, and that his shaky handwriting was the only blemish (C- in penmanship) on an otherwise perfect report card.

He suspects nothing.

His parents know far too much. They got the word on Nov. 15 that their only child has Friedreich’s ataxia, a very rare neurological disease known to weaken muscles, slur speech, bend spines, force kids into wheelchairs and deliver an early death, generally in the form of ... Read More...

Preparing for growth beyond its proposed new hospital in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, Children’s Memorial Hospital said it paid $18 million Tuesday for a 99-year lease on a building from the Archdiocese of Chicago at 155 E. Superior St.

The six-story building is less than one block from the future site of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. That facility, which is scheduled open in 2012 and cost $1 billion, will replace Children’s Memorial’s Lincon Park hospital.

A bit of pleasant news was buried in the Business Section of the Sun-Times yesterday. St. Francis Hospital in Blue Island was sold to an investor group who promise to keep the troubled hospital open and invest $30 Million in improvements to the facility.

Contrast this to the Front Page howls in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times a month ago claiming that St. Francis could not be sold at any price. Apparently it could be sold, and even attract a sizable investor. Incidentally, this is the same investor who had been negotiating with St. Francis for over a year, apparently unknown to The Tribune and Sun-Times.

There still is a major hurdle to providing healthcare in Blue Island. The Illinois Healthcare Facilities Planning Board has yet to approve the sale of the hospital. Yes, this is the same Board once graced by Stuart Levine, brokered by Tony Rezko, and ... Read More...

Cook County Board President Todd Stroger has two weeks to name directors to a new, independent board to oversee the county’s vast Bureau of Health Services, which critics contend is a patronage-laden fiefdom controlled by 8th Ward Democrats….....Here’s the list:

*Dr. David Ansell, vice president and chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center

*Fernando Grillo, former secretary of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation

*Warren Batts, retired Premark International CEO

*Dr. Carl Bell, president and CEO of Community Mental Health Council & Foundation Inc.

*Norman Bobins, chairman emeritus of LaSalle Bank Corp.

*Daniel Cantrell, who is on the staff of U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.)

*David Carvalho, deputy director of the Illinois Dept. of Public Health

*Margaret Davis, executive director of the Healthcare Consortium of Illinois

*Dr. Joseph Flaherty, dean of the College of Medicine at University of Illinois-Chicago

*Quin Golden, former chief of staff ... Read More...

Whatever the outcome of the Tony Rezko trial, it has had one salutary effect: The uselessness of another government bureaucracy is on full display

I’m referring to the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, which was created in 1974 with the misguided notion that health care costs could be controlled by government clamping down on hospital construction.

Rezko is charged with stocking the board with an acquiescent majority, which he used to try to engineer board decisions for kickbacks. At Rezko’s instructions, according to testimony in the trial, that board approved a new hospital in Crystal Lake, even though state health experts said the Crystal Lake hospital wasn’t needed. Expertise has a way in Chicago and Illinois of collapsing in the face of hurricanes fueled by greed and corruption.

As interesting as the testimony in the lengthy trail has been, detailing the ins and outs of the arcane form of government ... Read More...

Should the number of hospitals in Illinois be based upon patient needs, or should hospitals be built based upon political payoffs to government officials?

In 2008, we have already seen a vigorous debate over different ways to expand the government’s role when it comes to our personal health-care options. Many of these debates involve hypothetical forecasts into the future. Here in Illinois, however, we need no such forecasts. We already have evidence of what happens when the government makes decisions over health care, providing us with interesting — and frightening — insight into how an expansion of the government’s role may impact us all.

A Downstate hospital has sued the state over its decision earlier this year to strip the institution of its property-tax exemption.
Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana filed suit Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court, asking that the Illinois Department of Revenue and Champaign…

As soon as today, the House of Representatives will vote to override President Bush’s veto of State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-SCHIP) expansion bill. The bill passed earlier this year with help from moderate Republicans – most notably Senator’s Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) in the US Senate.

The concept of the SCHIP was originally to fund health insurance for children in families that earned too much to be Medicaid eligible but were to poor to pay for insurance in the individual market, or they worked in a low-wage position in which employee health benefits were not provided.

The program has been somewhat successful in the expanding health insurance coverage to these groups of people. However, about half of those joining the program were dropping their private coverage in favor of “free government insurance.” In addition, states, Illinois being a chief culprit, were expanding the program ... Read More...