The attached stories are fraction of almost 100 health-related stories by Hilary Waldman published in The Hartford Courant during 2007. Together, they reflect a year’s worth of health reporting that attempts to illuminate nationally relevant trends and circumstances in health care often told through the eyes and stories of people who experience care, lack care, have trouble getting care or in the case of “patients in the dark” get downright lousy care. Diagnosis Hyperextension uses several days in the life of a small city hospital emergency room to illustrate the findings of the Institute of Medicine report on emergency room overcrowding, entitled: “At the Breaking Point.” “Just Pure Medicine,” uses a tiny mobile primary care clinic run by a Catholic charitable group as a microcosm where all of the nation’s health care woes converge. “Patients in the Dark,” uses the case of a former Hartford trauma surgeon whose sloth may have played a role in the death of a teenager in the emergency room of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to shed light on how difficult it remains to use public data banks to identify (and thus possibly avoid) bad doctors. “The Fiercest of Loves” is a human interest story that looks at what happens when a loving mother does the wrong thing with the best intentions and ends up losing custody of her daughter who is critically ill with lupus. Together, these stories show both a breadth of health care stories, most ofwhich are pulled together with common threads all of which can be traced to the biggest issues that contribute to the nation’s health care crisis _ too many uninsured patients, the burden of chronic disease, bad doctors who inflate costs etc.
