UMC Cut Worries East End Residents

By James Wright Special to the Capital News

The cut in the subsidy that the United Medical Center gets from the District of Columbia government has residents who live east of the Anacostia River worried.

On May 14, 2019 the D.C. Council voted to reduce the annual subsidy to the United Medical Center (UMC) from $40 million to $15 million as a part of its $15.6 billion budget proposal on first reading. D.C. Councilmember Trayon White (D-Ward 8) voted "present" on the passage of the budget, citing concerns that the city's proposed financial plan does little for the benefit of Ward 8 residents, including the cut and closure of UMC without a guarantee of a new hospital to replace it.

The cut was engineered by D.C. Councilmember Vincent Gray (D-Ward 7) who chairs the Committee on Health.

"I want to express my appreciation to my council colleagues who worked with me to advance a path to a real, comprehensive healthcare system on the East End of the District in Wards 7 and 8," said Gray, who has served as the chair of the D.C. Council and as mayor of the District. "This includes a state-of-the-art community hospital that will open on Dec. 31, 2022.”

“This hospital will serve as a catalyst for the creation of a true healthcare system in Wards 7 and 8."

The council is set to vote on the second and final reading of the budget on May 28, 2019.

UMC is the only public hospital in the District and the only full-service health institution located east of the Anacostia River. UMC is also the largest single employer in Ward 8. 

The hospital was founded in 1966 as Cafritz Memorial and in 1974, renamed Greater Southeast Community Hospital.

The hospital got its present name, UMC, in 2008 as a result of Specialty Hospitals of America becoming the new managers in the light of two bankruptcies. UMC is presently managed by Mazars USA LLP.

UMC has had financial difficulties through the years because of management issues that have produced bailouts from the District government.  In addition, UMC serves patients who generally cannot pay for services out of pocket and some who use Medicaid and Medicare, government programs that can be difficult to work with because of bureaucracy. When patients can't pay, sometimes UMC eats the cost of service and this can be expensive.

There is widespread speculation that the reduction in the subsidy will produce massive layoffs at UMC and that concerns Salim Adofo, the advisory neighborhood commissioner who represents 8C07 , a district close to UMC.

"I have talked to several of my constituents and while they are concerned about the quality of care and service at the hospital, they really have concerns regarding where employees are going to go when they are laid off," Adofo said. "For the people who work, there are questions such as how will they feed their families. They need sustainable employment."

The chair of UMC's board is former D.C. Council member LaRuby May, who represented Ward 8 from May 14, 2015 to January 2, 2017. 

May said the council's actions to cut UMC's subsidy so severely "is significant."

"The council doesn't take into consideration the impact the cut has," May said. "The cut impacts real people who live real lives. They are people who need us."

May noted that the subsidy reduction will lead some patients "to suffer". She said, however, that the board must comply with the council's wishes.

"We will have to right size operations and make sure that the team at UMC delivers quality patient care and patient safety," she said.

The UMC funding cut and ultimate closure is tied to a perspective hospital being built on the St. Elizabeths East campus that is to be managed by Universal Health Services Inc (UHS). The same company that runs the George Washington University Hospital. UHS wants to manage the forthcoming St. Elizabeths East but has made it clear to city leaders that employees unions will be discouraged and Howard University medical students and faculty won't be welcome, either.

If the Howard University medical education community doesn’t have access to the St. Elizabeths East hospital, its accreditation may be affected.  

Ralph Chittams Sr. lives in Ward 7 and is very politically active in District politics. Chittams said he believes the approach of having a hospital, whether it is UMC or the one at St. Elizabeths, isn't in the best interest of East End residents anyway.

"A hospital east of the river is not a critical need," Chittams said. "What is needed is an increase in urgent health centers and that will cost the fraction of a hospital."

Chittams said urgent care centers could have specialists and general practitioners rotate "maybe two or three times a week" to serve East End residents. He said the talk of a new hospital "is a political red herring" and "has nothing to do with improving health outcomes".

Billionaire pledges to pay student debt for 2019 class at historic black US college

Robert Smith makes pledge to eliminate students’ debt estimated at $40m at Morehouse, Martin Luther King’s alma mater

Martin Pengelly

“My family will pay off your loans”, billionaire tells graduating students.

Delivering the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr, the billionaire technology investor and philanthropist Robert F. Smith made a surprise announcement: his family would wipe out the student debt of the entire class of 2019.

Smith’s words to nearly 400 graduating seniors were greeted with a moment of stunned silence, then, unsurprisingly, the biggest cheers of the morning.

“On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re gonna put a little fuel in your bus,” Smith said. “This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans.”

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he added: “I know my class will pay this forward.”

Smith, who received an honorary doctorate in the ceremony, had already announced a $1.5m gift to the college. The Journal-Constitution reported that the pledge to eliminate student debt for the 2019 class was estimated at $40m.

Aaron Mitchom, a 22-year-old finance major, told the Associated Press he had drawn up a spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take him to pay back $200,000 in student loans. It came to 25 years at half his monthly salary, he said. In an instant, that number vanished. Mitchom wept.

“I can delete that spreadsheet,” he said. “I don’t have to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was shocked. My heart dropped. We all cried. In the moment it was like a burden had been taken off.”

His mother, Tina Mitchom, was also shocked. Eight family members, she said, including Mitchom’s 76-year-old grandmother, took turns over four years co-signing on the loans that got their student across the finish line.

“It takes a village,” she said. “It now means he can start paying it forward and start closing this gap a lot sooner, giving back to the college and thinking about a succession plan for his younger siblings.”

Unpaid student debt, which last year stood at $1.5tn, has become a major national problem. Under Trump appointee Betsy DeVos, however, the federal education department has been found to have rejected 99 percent of applications for student debt forgiveness.

The issue has duly become a point of contention in the Democratic presidential primary. Last month, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren won widespread praise when she published a plan to cancel much student debt and make public college free, funded by a tax on the super rich.

Subject to a distinction between commitments to tuition-free college and debt-free college, Warren is not alone in focusing on the cost of further education. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, for example, pursued it in 2016 and is doing so again this year.

Among other candidates, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has said she will allow students to refinance debt at a lower interest rate while Kamala Harris of California told a CNN town hall “we need a … commitment to debt-free college, which I support”.

Others have made similar remarks without offering actual policy plans. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar has said she is not in favor of debt- or tuition-free college, telling CNN: “If I were a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would.” She says she supports efforts to relieve but not remove such burdens.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has released a proposal to make college debt-free for low-income students. It read in part: “Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are vital for this country and our communities and deserve to receive more dedicated support.”

Morehouse is an all-male HBCU. Smith, who is African American, is an engineer by training who has also donated to Cornell University in New York. He also studied at Columbia.

Smith grew up in a predominantly black, middle class neighborhood in Denver, CO. Both of his parents have PhD’s in education.

As founder and chief executive of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm that invests in software, data and technology driven companies, he placed 355th on the 2019 Forbes list of richest Americans.

Smith is also the only African American to be part of the Giving Pledge initiative; an agreement for billionaires to donate portions of money to charities and other causes. One of his causes is ensuring equal opportunity for African Americans.

“The future of the planet and our people is not one for the wealthy to wage alone,” He says in his pledge.

Morehouse president David A Thomas told us Smith’s gift would have a profound effect.

“Many of my students,” he said, “are interested in going into teaching, for example, but leave with an amount of student debt that makes that untenable. In some ways, it was a liberation gift for these young men that just opened up their choices.”

The Journal-Constitution quoted Tonga Releford, a Morehouse class of 2019 parent, as saying her son’s student loans totaled about $70,000.

“I feel like it’s Mother’s Day all over again,” she said.

Her husband, Charles Releford II, also a Morehouse graduate, said their younger son was a junior.

“Maybe [Smith] will come back next year,” he said.

The sharecropper who became Mississippi's first black female mayor and advised six US presidents, has died

(CNN) — Civil rights activist Unita Blackwell made history in 1976, becoming Mississippi's first black female mayor. She died on Monday at age 86.

Unita Blackwell may have been born into humble beginnings on March 18, 1933, but her activism and courage helped change the course of history for African-Americans.

Her son, Jeremiah Blackwell Jr., told CNN his mother died from a buildup of fluid in her heart and lungs, after a lengthy battle with dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Blackwell was the first black female mayor in Mississippi, elected as mayor of Mayersville 12 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Unita Blackwell, shown in 1992, long advocated for voting and other rights. As an active member in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Blackwell helped African-Americans register to vote.

Taking a bus from Mississippi to Atlantic City, New Jersey, she was part of the group that pressured the 1964 Democratic National Convention not to accept the all-white delegation from her state.

And throughout her civil right activism, Blackwell went to jail repeatedly for the cause.

After the Civil Rights Act passed, the Clarion-Ledger reported, the activist and politician went onto advise six US presidents: Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Humble beginnings as a family of sharecroppers. Much of Blackwell's history is preserved through oral history interviews she gave to the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. 

In those interviews, she talked about her family's life as sharecroppers in the small Mississippi Delta town, Lula, where she was born.

Blackwell's mother was illiterate; she was determined that her children would be educated. Because she wasn't allowed to go to school in Mississippi, she went to live with a relative, "Aunt Big Eighty," in West Helena, Arkansas.

When Blackwell wasn't in school or church, she was in the fields helping pick and chop cotton -- she could pick up to 300 pounds a day. After her schooling finished, she spent most of her time working in the fields and sharecropping.

That all changed in the spring of 1964. The Freedom Riders had come to Mayersville, where Blackwell was living.

Freedom Riders changed the course of her history

Freedom Riders were groups of people that took buses throughout the Deep South, challenging Jim Crow laws and segregation. "They were talking about doing something for people," Blackwell said of young activists. "And [I] always felt that from the inside, I wanted to do something."

Before they came to town in 1964, Blackwell didn't even know she had the right to vote.

When the Riders tried to hold a civil rights meeting in the local church, a board of supervisors’ member told them if they did the church would be burned down. They held the meeting anyway. 

Soon after, Blackwell and seven others were in the Issaquena County courthouse telling the circuit clerk -- who went on later to serve on Blackwell's board -- they were going to be registering to vote.

The group failed the registration exam. Voter registration laws empowered voting registrars to fail anyone they chose to fail, according to SNCC digital records. "You didn't pass those tests," remembered Blackwell.

As for her vow "do something," Blackwell continued to push for equal rights. In 1965, she and others sued Issaquena schools, resulting in desegregation a few years later.

Just 12 years after she stepped into that courthouse to register to vote, the people of Mayersville elected her mayor. She served multiple terms over more than 20 years, according to the Clarion Ledger.

The Knowledge Garden

A Complicated Legacy of Gentrification

By Eric Johnson

Gentrification or the shift in demographics along racial and economic lines has proven to be a topic of particular relevancy to current social divisions.  On the one hand gentrification has provided attention to neighborhoods long neglected. In those neighborhoods, poor communities of color have been making demands for systematic change since the 1970’s; demands such as better schooling, better housing and increased economic opportunity.  Most of these requests have been met with reluctance if even acknowledged at all. Many families in these neighborhoods have experienced what residents believe to be completely avoidable tragedies. This includes persistent unemployment rates that often double what is experienced in suburban middle class communities.

 In the face of disproportionate unemployment rates, similar patterns have been observed in banking practices. Studies have shown that small business loans were in some cases five times as likely to be denied to people of color despite having similar economic profiles as those in white communities.  In this current social and economic climate many young people lack a quality education and economic opportunity that is available in neighboring communities. This persistent reality has seemingly gone completely unnoticed by the broader community and has developed a sense of resentment that is both deep ceded and from certain vantage points justified.  For more than 40 years urban school systems have lacked basic necessities that many youths in predominately white communities take for granted. In extreme cases this includes the simple right to survive the daily journey to and from school. The plight of urban neighborhoods has been well documented; noticed as early as 1965 with The Moynihan Report. Despite its presence in history, very little has been done to resolve these reoccurring issues.  Though individual behavior and accountability cannot be minimized, the systemic neglect of urban neighborhoods is shown to have reached epic proportions.

There are those in poor urban neighborhoods who have preyed on hardworking, law abiding families who only ask for an opportunity to improve their quality of life. These are realities that cannot be ignored in this system of neglect.  Because poor, urban, predominantly black neighborhoods have been written off as undesirable, there is a high sense of suspicion and resentment for the people fighting toward institutional change. As many neighborhoods began to reach their peak of dilapidation and depression, some saw economic opportunity seemingly at the expense of families and community traditions. However, some could ask the question:  Is that what’s really going on here? One could make the argument that the roots of gentrification lie in a trend that started in 1970’s, when many black, middle class families elected to leave urban communities for the opportunities they perceived in predominantly white suburbs. So why are diverse, middle class populations moving into once neglected residences being met with more suspicion than the minority populations moving out of them?  Rather than invest in the neighborhoods that have bred well-educated and upwardly-mobile minorities, many families chose to move to safer neighborhoods with better schools for their children; a decision that was both their right and rational. The populations left behind; however, in most cases were the most vulnerable and most in need of the resources that exiting families had.

Gentrification causes demographics to change and often results in the relocation of many poor people to unfamiliar, hostile neighborhoods.  The consequences of the recent social and cultural mixture left over from this transition has at times been explosive and nonetheless, complicated.  The social divisions that followed not only formed new realities that influenced individual behavior but forcibly changed institutional policies and practices.  

Gentrification represents the best and worst of what change has to offer.  The best in that, its root is the freedom of individuals to exercise the right to act in their best interest: this includes the minority families who made a profit by selling their property to developers.  While some reinvested in their communities, others chose not to. Regardless, it was their right to choose what they did with their money. It is also the worst in that capitalism often preys on a society’s most vulnerable and disenfranchised populations.  It was the poor, minority populations that saw the most damaging effects of gentrification. The silver lining in this social quagmire is that the poorest populations that remain in gentrified neighborhoods are living in safer more economically viable areas than they were before.  Whether or not it is worth the cost is the subject of a healthy discussion for some time to come.

Of course, change is a part of life; however, as a society we should consistently examine how policy, practice, law, and individual behavior impacts those who are most vulnerable. The most important lesson to be learned from the complicated legacy of gentrification is that the biggest threat to what we aspire for our society may be looking back at us in our mirrors.