For those among us that have a vague recollection of a time when the US health care system was different and when it began to change, Dr. Victoria Sweet presents a gentle reminder:
The almshouse was how we used to take care of those who didn’t have health insurance. Every county had a free county hospital for the acutely ill, and a free county almshouse for everyone else who needed care.Clearer to me were the days of the dreadful state mental institutions that Ronald Reagan and liberal "do-gooders" closed in favor of small, local, residential, mental health care facilities. Except we didn't build those alternative facilities and released those in need of better care to live on the streets where everyone can either ignore or complain about homelessness and not do much about the underlying problem.Beginning in the 1950s, however, first the county almshouses and then the county hospitals were closed, for reasons of economy (as demanded from the right) and social justice (as demanded from the left),...
On God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
"Victoria Sweet writes beautifully about the enormous richness of life at Laguna Honda, the chronic [care] hospital where she has spent the last twenty years, and the intense sense of place and community that binds patients and staff there. Such community in the medical world is vanishingly rare now, and Laguna Honda may be the last of its kind. . . . God's Hotel is a most important book which raises fundamental questions about the nature of medicine in our time. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the "business" of health care--and especially those interested in the humanity of health care." -- Oliver Sacks
