In the midst of the angry national standoff over health care, one Denver TV station is devoting a half-hour to documenting the issues faced by local patients and hospital workers.
Denver Health represents “ground zero in the national debate,” according to Tony Kovaleski, whose reporting is showcased in “Health Care: The National Emergency,” at 4 p.m. today on KMGH-Channel 7.
Credit the station with stepping up at a time when the national conversation on this complex issue is both pressing and divisive.
And credit Denver Health with granting unusual access to the camera in the midst of busy care-giving.
A public hospital, which bills itself as “Colorado’s primary safety-net institution,” Denver Health treats one of every three kids in Denver and one-quarter of the Denver population as a whole. It is “a critical flash point in the national debate,” Kovaleski says.
Channel 7 followed four patients over several months for this project and tells their stories with the emotional and medical angles involved.
The report addresses the controversial “public option” aspect of the proposed reform plan. Indeed, the broadcast notes that there are public options right now, happening every day, available at Denver Health and other hospitals around the country.
“It’s not that we’re a proponent of the public option,” Kovaleski said. “We’re just exposing the truth.”
The truth is, in the cases of the four patients whose varying health problems Channel 7 chronicles at Denver Health — and for 47 million other Americans without health insurance — a public hospital and Medicare and Social Security are the only things keeping many people going.
From their vantage points on the frontlines, Denver Health’s doctors, social workers and administrators talk about the way the medical world works.
“Why did you come to the ER instead of to a physician?” one patient is asked. The answer, again and again, is “no insurance.”
The half-hour follows an otherwise healthy 25-year-old hiker with a broken leg, a young girl with a bee sting, a 58-year-old bone-cancer patient and a middle-aged homeless woman.
The result is not a politically slanted argument, just an eye-opening story about a public hospital, “caught between the money and the medicine.”
Remarkably, Denver Health manages to stay in the black, despite providing more than $2.1 billion in care for the uninsured over the last decade. More than 40 percent of the care provided last year was for uninsured patients.
Why should a guy upstairs be denied care while another fellow gets good care one floor below, the cancer patient asks. Something’s wrong with that picture, he concludes.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
