Proud of Ben Taub Hospital? Thank a Chronicle letter writer
Last Sunday, we published an adapted excerpt from Dr. Ricardo Nuila’s new book, “The People’s Hospital.” Nuila, who’s worked at Ben Taub Hospital for a little over a decade, details his heartrending experiences caring for hundreds of patients from all over the world and all walks of life.
We need places like Ben
Taub because, as David McMillin, a reader from The Woodlands, points out, “If your life depended on it, you could not devise a more costly, inefficient, unfair and complicated system of health care than we have in this country . ... There has to be a better way.”
Nuila argues there is a better way. Ben Taub is a start, and a model for the rest of the United States. It’s a place where all — uninsured and insured, indigent and wealthy, undocumented and citizen, alike —– are provided first-rate, humane treatment.
Doctors can prioritize care, not cost, because the hospital is part of Harris Health, the nation’s third-largest medical safety net. It provides more than $2 billion in health care annually. And it can do that through our property taxes, which cover over half of the health care system’s budget.
For many, Harris Health has meant the difference between life or death. It has also meant a world of difference in taxpayer savings, as it allows patients to receive treatment before they need emergency care.
The system isn’t perfect, but it’s nothing short of miraculous in a city with the highest uninsured rate in the country. And we have a Houston Chronicle letter writer to thank for its existence.
Six decades ago, only one Houston hospital treated those who couldn’t pay: Jefferson Davis Hospital. Its costs were split between the city and county, leaving the hospital vulnerable to the shifting winds of politics. A new charity hospital, Ben Taub, had been proposed, and a councilman wanted to cut Jefferson Davis’ budget further still.
Jan de Hartog, a Dutch playwright who had spent eight months volunteering as an orderly at Jefferson Davis, was fed up. So as you, my fellow readers, are wont to do, he wrote a strongly worded letter to the editor.
Published Sunday, April 21, 1963, de Hartog’s letter began: “Not many will mourn the demise of Jefferson Davis Hospital, but it is a matter of conjecture among the staff how long it will take for the new hospital in the Medical Center to turn into the same pigsty filled with medieval horrors as Old J.D.”
Those “medieval horrors” included “the two dark wards in the back, where, because of the lack of staff, the sick, the drunk, the desperate and the dying are often ditched into the cold sagging beds fully dressed, trousers soaked with urine.”
He described rooms where “the floors are slippery with blood and vomit” and beds “can no longer be elevated because the mechanism has broken down, so they are propped up with chairs under the mattress and held together with surgical tape.”
De Hartog decried officials who allowed this “monument of misery” to fester, who used the city’s indigent sick as political pawns. He urged Houstonians to take a stand:
“Let us wake up to the fact that we are a metropolis now, and that not only the eyes of
Texas are upon us, or those of the United States, or even the world, but the eyes of God.”
According to our Chronicle archives, dozens of letters, including one signed by 18 student nurses, poured in. “I don’t remember ever having been more deeply moved by any one article,” one reader wrote.
“Now, what can I do?”
Another jumped into action: “I am sending a copy of this letter to the mayor and to the county judge, in the hope that either or both will take the lead in solving the ‘mercy hospital’ problem. It cannot be swept under the rug of ‘politics as usual.’ ”
De Hartog then published a book, “The Hospital.” It revealed new details, such as the cockroach that crawled into a patient’s tracheostomy tube.
That was the final straw for Republican County Judge Bill Elliott. He went undercover and visited the hospital as a nighttime volunteer. The appalling experience convinced him the county desperately needed a new taxing authority to fund a hospital district.
The idea had been voted down before. It took two more tries. In 1965, a combination of grassroots groups, many more editorials and letters, as well as the support of Judge Elliott and the Harris County Medical Society, convinced enough Houstonians to vote in favor of a property tax to support medical care for the most vulnerable.
You know how I first learned about that history? From a letter a reader wrote in May.
You who, like de Hartog, write us letters, do so because you care. And yes, also to let off steam. But next time you’re feeling hopeless, wondering what difference another letter to the editor will make, remember this history. Your letters really can bring about change.
As one reader put it on May 17, 1963: “Mr. de Hartog almost single handedly has forced local politicians in whom we entrust our government to their knees. ... This is a great victory … (but) the greatest satisfaction of it comes from the knowledge of a simple truth: That citizens control their government, and not, definitely not, vice versa.” Regina Lankenau is assistant op-ed editor at the Houston Chronicle. This piece originally appeared in Thursday’s SaysHou newsletter, a subscriber exclusive dedicated to letters to the editor. Sign up at: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/newsletters/opinion/