Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients
Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care?
If Camden, New Jersey, becomes the first American community to lower its medical costs, it will have a murder to thank. At nine-fifty on a February night in 2001, a twenty-two-year-old black man was shot while driving his Ford Taurus station wagon through a neighborhood on the edge of the Rutgers University campus. The victim lay motionless in the street beside the open door on the driver’s side, as if the car had ejected him. A neighborhood couple, a physical therapist and a volunteer firefighter, approached to see if they could help, but police waved them back.
“He’s not going to make it,” an officer reportedly told the physical therapist. “He’s pretty much dead.” She called a physician, Jeffrey Brenner, who lived a few doors up the street, and he ran to the scene with a stethoscope and a pocket ventilation mask. After some discussion, the police let him enter the crime scene and attend to the victim. Witnesses told the local newspaper that he was the first person to lay hands on the man.
“He was slightly overweight, turned on his side,” Brenner recalls. There was glass everywhere. Although the victim had been shot several times and many minutes had passed, his body felt warm. Brenner checked his neck for a carotid pulse. The man was alive. Brenner began the chest compressions and rescue breathing that should have been started long before. But the young man, who turned out to be a Rutgers student, died soon afterward.
- Tags:
- AtlantiCare
- Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers
- data analysis
- David Tilton
- George Kelling
- health insurance
- health outcomes
- health reform
- healthcare system
- hospitalization
- hospitals
- James Q. Wilson
- Jeffrey Brenner
- Jessica Cordero
- Kathy Jackson
- mapping crime
- medical costs
- Medicare
- Merck Foundation
- Nathan Gunn
- Obamacare
- patient care
- police reform commission
- preventative care
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- Rushika Fernandopulle
- Special Care Center
- Tim Ferris
- VeriskHealth
- Vibha Gandhi
- William Bratton
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