Laurie Abraham understands how screwed up the American health-care system is in ways that perhaps even reform czarina Hillary Clinton doesn’t.
Abraham, 29, is a middle-class kid from Cleveland who attended Northwestern University and began a journalism career in Chicago, first for an American Medical Association publication, then the Chicago Reporter, a newsletter on racial matters.
She did award-winning work on public health matters at the Reporter. In particular, she wrote with passion and authority on public health’s failings toward Chicago’s poor.
That work helped get her a one-year law fellowship at Yale University and, then, enough grants to expand on her Reporter labor and write, “Mama Might Be Better Off Dead-The Failure of Health Care in America” (University of Chicago Press, $22.50).
The book, which will be in stores nationwide within 10 days, will be excerpted in the Chicago Reader. Given the imminent unveiling of the Clinton administration health-care proposals, the timing couldn’t be better.
Her effort is equally revealing and unremittingly unnerving as she follows the medical travails running through four generations of a family in North Lawndale, the predominantly black, woefully impoverished Chicago community.
There’s elderly Cora Jackson, a diabetic with high blood pressure who ends up with one leg, then a second, amputated; her son, who suffers a stroke due to high blood pressure at age 48; her granddaughter, the book’s protagonist, who attends to everybody else, including a husband on kidney dialysis, as she struggles on welfare; and grandchildren who symbolize our inattention to preventive care and were among those without innoculations prior to Chicago’s 1989 measles outbreak.
They personify the nexus between poverty and illness.
The grandmother, Jackson, might have saved one, if not both, legs if she could have afforded transportation to a doctor. But Medicare doesn’t cover that unless you’re then admitted to a hospital. As she began getting bad bed sores, she couldn’t afford adult diapers, at $60 a box. Much of the medication she needed wasn’t covered by Mediciare or Medicaid. She’s since died.
“Even having Medicaid and Medicare, you miss a lot,” Abraham explained last week. “They (the family) went to a family doctor who had been disciplined for not immunizing young patients. It shows how a lot of good doctors just won’t locate in places where Medicaid patients will be.”
Abraham does not purport to offer remedies for all the system’s ills. But she’s convinced that there must be some insurance for everyone, better preventive care, payment for medications for those with chronic diseases, and subsidies for transportation.
The young author saw lots to make her angry, but maintains a clear head throughout an easy-to-read, 259-page book.
“I’m not naive to think that poor people and rich people will have the same health care. But I do think there should be some leveling, something more humane.”
Say goodbye, Jim
The media apparently missed one potential victim of Vice President Al Gore’s plan to chop government waste: former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson.
Now a successful Chicago attorney, Thompson chairs the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, a secretive group that oversees the legality of snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies. He was named by President Bush in 1990 and enjoys nice digs and a secretary in the Old Executive Office Building when in Washington to get the poop on snoops.
But one Gore recommendation appears to mean curtains for the board by folding it into a related group, the Foreign Intelligence Oversight Board.
Hang in there, Chevy
With Chevy Chase arriving last week, pundits still blabbed about the “battle for late night” as involving Chase, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Ted Koppel. Hokum.
Figures from the Arbitron ratings service show that Chicago viewers did prefer one of the big guys, Koppel, between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. “Nightline” wound up with an average 21 percent share of those watching TV during the period, Monday through Thursday.
Letterman followed at 18 percent but, notably, “Roseanne” reruns on WPWR-Ch. 50 were next at 15 percent. Then came Leno (13) and a virtual tie between WGN-Ch. 9’s new “Cheers” reruns and Chase (9 apiece), with the latter not plummeting as skeptics (like me) figured after he bombed creatively. Figures from Nielsen, the other service, were comparable, with “Roseanne” and Leno tied in third and “Cheers” ahead of Chase.
This unrelated curiosity: Channel 50’s airing of Jerry Lewis movies simultaneous with Ch. 9’s airing of Lewis’ telethon did fairly well, better during some hours. On Labor Day between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. (when Channel 9 switched to the Cubs), the telethon had a 6 share while the movies had a 5, Nielsen says.
Just the fax, Ray
The path to celebrity can be serpentine. Take Ray Hanania. Please.
Hanania is your typical Chicago journalist-turned-failed political candidate who is also a computer programmer, video magazine publisher, video store owner and Town of Cicero special events director. You know the type.
His most publicized achievement was his either resigning (company claim) or being canned (his claim) as a Sun-Times political reporter over an alleged conflict of interest, namely his then-romance with City Treasurer Miriam Santos.
Until now.
On Sept. 2, Hanania sent a fax to no fewer than 150 Chicago newspapers (“I’ve got a very sophisticated set-up”), offering his wisdom and services as an Arab-American spokesman in the wake of the historic agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberaton Organization. It opened with a certain typographic immodesty:
“RAY HANANIA, Chicago media and political consultant and American Arab community adviser, today called on American Arab leaders and community groups to publicly endorse the anticipated `Gaza/Jericho’ Agreement hammered out by Israeli and PLO negotiators.”
Hanania heard not a peep from anyone except the tiny south suburban Star Herald. Then (drum roll, please) came a call from The New York Times, which had not even been sent the fax “They don’t like faxes and don’t give out their number,” he informs.
The Times’ Chicago correspondent, Don Terry, had worked at the Sun-Times, knew Hanania and was seeking Arab American reaction. It explains a Page 1 story in Thursday’s edition-headlined, “Accord a Bittersweet Occasion for Arabs in U.S.”-which opened with musings of Hanania. Inside was his picture, taken, unknown to readers, while counseling Arab-Americans on the difficulty of their getting press attention.
Soon after the Times story appeared, Hanania, whose most visible action of late came in shepherding the victory of Cicero president Betty Loren-Maltese, became a wanted man. He’d moved from Page 1 of the Times into the Rolodexes of network TV news producers, many of whom would need to re-enroll in journalism school if the Times weren’t around to steal from.
Hanania, who a week earlier would have deemed it a miracle to have his name boldfaced by Kup, was contacted to appear on CNN’s “Crossfire” and ABC’s “Good Morning, America.”
Now, if he’s really press-savvy, Hanania, acting as special events director, will announce a Yasser Arafat Day in Cicero.
Setting the record straight
“This is probably the first time in union history there’s been a unanimous vote like this,” a Fox-WFLD-Ch. 32 reporter intoned last week after the Chicago Teachers Union rejected management’s “final” offer.
In fact, recalls Robert Healey, the former union president who heads the Chicago Federation of Labor, such an action has been taken at least five, maybe 10 times, over the past 20 years.
And one final word
Finally, inspired by newly chastened WBBM-Ch. 2, I look at you, true Chicagoans, knowing your craving for authenticity, and with deepest insincerity announce a new motto:
“Sunday Watch . . . Real People. Real items.”
