Whether in the form of new sports stadiums or planned acres of riverfront condos, the neighborhoods along the Anacostia River often serve as guinea pigs for bureaucratic government forces.
Now the debate is how to best provide access to medical care for a community that has the highest rates of chronic disease in the District, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.
The area has been without a hospital since D.C. General closed in 2001.
The debate over the hospital grew heated earlier this month, when a task force appointed by D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams concluded that the city should not build the proposed full-scale National Capital Medical Center.
Instead, a 10-5 majority argued that the city should expand and renovate the much smaller Greater Southeast Community Hospital, and build an emergency care facility or “healthplex.”
The city council now finds itself laden with the unenviable task of weighing residents’ health needs against the economic realities of building and operating a state-of-the-art health facility in the city’s poorest area.
Councilmember David A. Gray (D-Ward 7) has remained behind the original proposal to build National Capital.
“Residents living in communities in the eastern part of the city need access to emergency healthcare,” Gray told the League of American Voters.
“When the District closed D.C. General Hospital, it essentially made access to emergency and trauma care more difficult,” he said.
Gray is opposed by Williams, who backs the recommendation of his task force, and Council members David Catania (D-at large) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), who ended their long term support for a full-scale hospital in the wake of the task force’s recommendation.
“There will be no new D.C. General Hospital,” Georgetown’s own councilmember Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) wrote on his web site, “but rather general healthcare centers, a much better idea.”
The issue was further complicated by last Wednesday’s announcement that the city will receive an unexpected windfall of $33 million from a national tobacco settlement that must be spent on city healthcare.
The city government originally planned on receiving $212 million from the settlement, but will now get $245 million, according to an Aug. 17 report in the Washington Business Journal.
It is understandable that the task force was originally reluctant to back the expensive hospital project in the context of a tough fiscal situation. Council members, however, should now see this rare moment of financial fortune as an opportunity to care for, rather than blandly gentrify, a neighborhood that needs it most.
Marco Cerna will return to City on a Hill on Sept. 7.
