4-17-12: Health Enterprise Zones
April 17, 2012 at 8:59 am 1 comment
“According to a number of measures, the State of Maryland is one of the highest performing states in the nation…Maryland also, despite its wealth, demonstrates significant disparities in healthcare and health outcomes.”
That’s from the Heath Disparities Work Group Final Report and Recommendations, which recommends the creation of Heath Enterprise Zones to encourage more medical professionals to locate to areas that have high health disparities.
Those zones were authorized on April 10 when Govenor O’Malley signed legislation creating them. For a look at the this latest attempt to tackle Maryland’s health disparities, Sheilah talks to Thomas LaViest, director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions, and William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor in Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown.
Entry filed under: Medicine, On Air, Policy, Politics. Tags: health Disparities, health Enterprise Zones, maryland.
Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast 
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Cindy Walsh | April 17, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Just as with the Enterprise Zones, Health Zones are specifically designed to give taxpayer money to private health institutions to do what they should and could be doing all along. Whether Johns Hopkins or MedStar among others, rather than expanding over all the state and beyond, our legislators simply had to say, that as a non-profit entity receiving public funds, you have responsibility to be in all neighborhoods. I question whether these institutions really meet the non-profit category. You are not meeting the people’s needs with expanded administration and salaries. Just as with Enterprise Zones these health institutions located themselves in financially lucretive areas and this policy seems to question where these Health Zone expansions will occur—Harbor East/West let’s say.
The state should get into the business of training doctors at discounted rates….state medical schools can do that……you don’t need to give taxpayer money for private medical school grads. Use taxpayer money to strengthen public institutions……Enterprise Zones and Health Zones are designed to do the opposite.