Harry Shearer: New Orleans' Medical Crisis, and the Solution

Published: August 24, 2007, 2:26 pm

Today, as we approach the second anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans, the city remains mired in a health-care crisis that includes a shortage of personnel, a shortage of facilities, and an absence of serious progress towards solving either shortage. Enter the people on the ground, the doctors and nurses and others still in the city who see the gaping hole in the indigent-care fabric. Today's Times-Picayune surveys the improvised patchwork solutions devised by these folks, finding specialists and facilities to cobble together a program of care. Money quote: As with so many aspects of storm recovery, the hard work of ordinary citizens has substituted for an institutional solution. As the state and the Feds continue to wrangle over the future of the city's health care structure--with relief not in sight until 2012, at the earliest--it's important to know who's getting the job done in the meantime. If this was New York, these people might even be called "heroes".

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