You can make all lives matter

Greenwich is uniquely positioned in the world. It has a tremendous number of people with intelligence, imagination, drive, and contacts to turn the resources which they can bring to bear to solve many of the problems facing us as a society. I’m going to illustrate this assertion with two projects from my past. One is essentially an individual project and the other was one leveraging organizations with which I had an affiliation.

1. Breaking up the largest loan shark racket preying on pharmacies.

I was recruited for this project by Roy Innis, the founder and president of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) who by profession was a pharmacist. In the early days of Medicare and Medicaid, New York City was having a tremendous problem reimbursing pharmacists for the Medicare and Medicaid prescriptions they filled. Pharmacies previously had been in a cash and carry business. Now with Medicare and Medicaid pharmacists had to pay for the prescription materials that they provided to customers but then had to wait many months to be reimbursed.

The city made many errors in processing the receivables, rejecting about 25 percent of everything submitted to them. This placed pharmacies in a terrible financial position. This was compounded by the fact at the loan sharks demanded the pharmacies make good on any failure by the city to pay. The mobsters were even seizing a number of pharmacies claiming bad debt. As a result, the Empire State Pharmaceutical Association threatened to boycott Medicare and Medicaid.

I identified a solution: create a system that would rapidly and accurately reimburse pharmacies for the Medicare and Medicaid prescriptions they had filled. This required developing a computer program that would be approved by the New York State and the federal government and then use their leverage to get the city to accept this new system.

I opened the new service in conjunction with the Harlem Commonwealth Council. It reduced the waiting time for reimbursement to about two to three weeks. The loan sharks were not terribly happy about the new system and burned out our office.

The Empire State Pharmaceutical Association canceled its planned boycott of Medicare and Medicaid. About this time Burton Roberts, the Bronx County District Attorney took action against the loan sharks and the city officials who were cooperating with them. This led to a major reform of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement process and destroyed the loan sharks.

2. Creating a mass training system in emergency first aid.

The second illustration of what Greenwich people can do involves the leveraging of other organizations. One of the things that was very clear in much of Africa and the Caribbean is that people generally had no idea of how to treat accident victims. Often if there was any vehicle transportation available, they would typically throw the person in the back of a truck and drive them to the nearest hospital, even if it were many miles away. I thought it made sense to make use of modern technology to create a film based system to teach emergency first aid. I had seen such a system in Canada where it was widely implemented. The results where fantastic. Among populations where the one-day course was widely implemented, it resulted in about a 25 percent reduction in the incidence of accidents and a 70 percent reduction in their severity. I thought it would make a great deal of sense to implement a similar system throughout anglophone Africa and the Caribbean. I recruited experts in Canada who helped me write the script and then I produced the film-based training system.

The Order of St. John in Barbados became our host during the production and filming of this training system and supplied the actors for the films. I visited some 30 countries around the world, typically meeting with the chief of state in each one to introduce the system which was then distributed to their countries. The impact was enormous, though it was very difficult to collect definitive statistics on the results. However, literally millions of people were trained and the system must have had very a significant impact, somewhat similar to that which was achieved in Canada.

These are two examples of what can be accomplished if you set your mind to it. Greenwich has the skills, talent and resources to do many things of significant magnitude. An example of what might be done would be to create a support system for our university graduates who don’t have access to a placement support system to help them find meaningful jobs. There is more than enough talent available in Greenwich to create such a system which would be of enormous benefit to recent graduates of the many universities and colleges our students attend and graduate from.