Since the 1960s the Chicago Department of Public Health has been taking temperatures, administering vaccines, and providing prenatal care to Chicago residents who have nowhere else to turn for health care. That may be about to change, and the prospect has some residents and health-care advocates feeling more than a little queasy.
He also says the move makes sense because the city and county already have partnerships with Saint Anthony’s. For the past four years the hospital’s midwives have staffed the South Lawndale clinic, and most of the clinic’s patients deliver their babies at the hospital (women who want their tubes tied at the time of delivery are sent to Cook County Hospital). And for the past three years county doctors have run a high-risk-pregnancy clinic at Saint Anthony’s. Saint Anthony’s will be responsible for midwifery and pediatrics at the new site, and county doctors will move their high-risk-pregnancy clinic out of Saint Anthony’s and into the new clinic. The city’s role will be reduced to managing cases and running the federal WIC program.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cristina Montoyo, a prenatal patient at South Lawndale who showed up for the protest, said, “The main thing is distrust, because that’s what’s happened in the past. They say things are going to be better, and afterward they forget about everything they promised. The government screws the poor.”
Yet some people don’t believe the health-care crisis for the uninsured has been solved even in neighborhoods where private clinics have set up shop. “If these places were providing the kinds of services that the community needed,” says Vega, “why would there be droves of people going over to the South Lawndale clinic and the county facilities?” She says she’s heard stories of private clinics in Little Village that won’t give medicaid patients appointments on Saturdays. “I guess they think medicaid patients don’t work,” she says. And she says the wait for an appointment at the only county clinic in the neighborhood is more than two months.
According to one health-care worker in that neighborhood, the county clinics in the area weren’t hurting for patients before the CDPH clinic closed. Now, he says, “We’re being totally overrun. With one less provider in the neighborhood, it’s just putting more stress back onto the ER system. And for those of us who are trying to help people access health care in a way that will really benefit them–by having primary-care providers–it’s just more difficult. There’s a crying need for more capacity, not less.”
