A doctor’s love letter to ‘the People’s Hospital’

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if we had a decent, publicly-funded health system — available to everybody, with or without insurance? We’ve got one, says Dr. Ricardo Nuila. It’s where he works.

And it could be a model for the whole country. Yes, really.

That’s the pitch he makes in his new book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine. It’s a love letter to Houston’s Ben Taub hospital, and an argument for bringing Ben Taub’s model — efficient, innovative, and cheap —to the rest of the country.

And if that seems unlikely in today’s political climate, well: Ben Taub’s wild origin story was plenty unlikely too.

That story takes us to the 1960’s, when Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog moved to Houston. He fell in love with the bustling, futuristic home of NASA and the Astrodome.

But he also discovered the city’s dreadful underside: a neglected charity hospital where largely African-American patients are left to seek health care in unsanitary and unsafe — hellish — conditions.

De Hartog and a group of Quaker volunteers waged a campaign to change that, and eventually found an unlikely ally who brought it over the finish line.

The People's Hospital is a heck of a book. We might want to start a book group someday, just to talk about it. If you want to grab a copy, here’s a link. (Or: Audiobook, or ebook.)

Here’s a transcript of the episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, Bentop Hospital is a publicly funded safety net hospital in Houston, Texas.
0:05.5	Majority of patients don't have insurance of any kind.
0:08.7	Dr. Ricardo Nueva has been working at Bentop since he was an intern, a medical student.
0:13.6	Took me on a tour.
0:14.7	I started here and literally I just did not want to leave here because I just just really enjoyed
0:21.9	my job here. He's just published a book called The People's Hospital. It's not just a love letter
0:27.2	to the place. It's a pitch and the pitch is not only is this place way way cheaper than what we're
0:33.3	used to. In many ways it's better and it's a model, a real alternative to what we're used to.
0:39.7	So when I ask him to pick one patient story from the book to tell, he picks a patient he calls
0:44.9	Stephen, a restaurant manager, a Republican, a guy who did not expect to end up here.
0:50.2	But he had a giant lump on the side of his throat and his insurance didn't cover much.
0:55.2	He paid cash up front to get seen in a local ER.
0:58.3	Finally, there was a doctor who had seen a CAT scan and said, you have tonsilor cancer.
1:04.7	However, you don't have insurance.
1:07.9	Tonsilor cancer, cancer of the tonsils that landed hard. So did the however.
1:14.7	He felt shitty that somebody could tell you cancer but there's nothing that we're going to do
1:19.5	about it because of your of how much and yeah, it's like it's too painful or too obvious.
1:24.8	To finish the sentence because of your insurance.
1:28.0	Somebody tells Stephen to try the public hospital, Ben Tog, and he expects the worst, but
1:33.8	that's not what he finds. He comes to love this place. This is like so Stephen, but he
1:39.8	gives gift cards to the people greeting at the door because they're nice and they do their job well
1:47.0	because they make his day. And it's not just that he likes the people at the door.
	...

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