Just as the national movement for a universal health care system in the United States seems to be growing to new heights (though public sentiment has been in favor of universal health care for a while now), the state of Georgia is attempting to roll back what little public care is available. The state is withholding funding for Grady Hospital, the internationaly renowned hospital, which is known, at least in Atlanta, for treating the poor and uninsured.
State bureaucrats don’t want Grady to close, but instead they want to transfer the board from public hands to a non-profit. Of course, they promise that Grady will still continue to serve the uninsured.
Activists groups, like Jobs with Justice and the Rainbow Coalition, are working hard to keep Grady public. Whether they, along with other concerned citizens are able to stop this takeover will likely determine whether the uninsured in Atlanta will continue to receive emergency care (without accumulating unsurmountable debt), but just the fact that residents are forced to struggle to have a say in this decision is indicative of the state of democracy in this society. If Grady is a public hospital, funded and controlled by public resources, shouldn’t it be up to citizens to decide what happens to Grady? If there are a significant number of citizens in Atlanta or Georgia that were interested in privatizing Grady, then perhaps a referendum would be in order.
That’s not how democracy functions in the United States. Instead, government and corporate beauracts set an agenda that pleases corporate interests. Democracy happens when outraged citizens organize and take to the streets in protest, and sometimes they win a measure of control over decisions. When protest is the only option, institutional democracy is broken. Everyone knows it’s broken though.
Viewing Grady as a crisis in democracy may give activists the best shot of saving the public hospital. Activists in favor of keeping Grady public seem to focus their battle over the issue of whether or not Grady should be kept public (they argue that we must fight to keep it public). But this stance actually pretends that citizens have a say in the decision.
Perhaps the more important question to raise is who should decide what to do with Grady? Should it be the people who have used and might at one point use Grady, the the people who work there, and the taxpayers that fund this hospital? Or, should the fate of the hospital be decided in a “secret meeting” by “the Grady board, the Fulton County Commission, the offices of the governor and lieutenant governor, the religious community and the corporate world.”
Everyone knows it’s the latter group that will make the important decisions. It is no surprise then that the AJC reports that “consensus is growing for the idea of putting daily Grady operations under the auspices of a non-profit corporation.” This statement is true if you disregard Atlanta citizens and just look at the relevant opinions, that is the opinions of the decision makers.
Advocates of keeping Grady public should not just defend the hospital’s current structure, but instead should organize around the idea that we can win real democratic institutions that give people authentic control over resources like Grady. It’s not enough to just fight the corporate takeover, we need to replace the system that would encourage such a takeover.
State senator Kasim Reed explains the situation a little more succinctly, “Everyone understands that he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Of course, Reed has no problem with this situation as the AJC explains thats he thinks “seats on the board should be distributed, proportionately, among the institutions that end up financing the new Grady.” Therein lies the true essence of American democracy: one dollar, one vote.
