This story was posted in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.”
Dr. Michael Shadid established the first cooperatively owned and operated hospital in the United States on this date in 1931. Shadid had been born in a mountain village in Lebanon, and knew firsthand how hard it was for the poor to get good health care. He was one of 12 kids, and only three of them survived infancy. The only medical care that the village received was the occasional visit from a Beirut doctor. Shadid was inspired to get medical training himself. He went to New York when he was 16, working as a peddler to save money for his education. Ten years later, after earning his medical degree at Washington University in Saint Louis, Shadid settled in Elk City, Oklahoma.
As medical technology advanced, the cost of medical care rose, and few people felt the hardship more than Oklahoma farmers. “There must exist some unknown germ, some filterable virus unknown to man, that bites certain persons in this world and turns them into reformers,” Shadid later wrote. “I’m willing to admit that I must have been bitten early and hard.” Using as his model the established Oklahoma tradition of farm cooperatives, Shadid envisioned a cooperative hospital that would be supported by the farmers’ annual membership fees. Doctors would be paid a salary out of those fees, and in return they would provide basic preventive care that poor farmers were not usually able to afford. But other local doctors were worried about losing their business. They wrote in to the newspapers accusing Shadid of fraud, and calling him a foreigner who was trying to tell Americans how to manage their health care system, even though by now he’d been in the country for 30 years. He almost lost his medical license for the unethical solicitation of patients. Doctors were reluctant to work for the Community Hospital if it meant defying the medical establishment. But the farmers who relied on the hospital rallied behind Shadid. “We think more of the few dollars invested in the Community Hospital than any investment we have ever made,” said one farmer. “I think this bunch fighting [Shadid] should be sat down so hard it would jar their ancestors for four generations.”
A not-for-profit offering a critical public service and getting attacked by the establishment that feels threatened. Sounds very familiar.
John, I assure you that there is no comparison between the selfish motives of Eva Moskowitz and the public spirit of the doctor who created this community hospital. You are delusional. He did not pay himself the equivalent of $800,000 a year nor did he have a PR staff to publicize his greatness to the world.
I am not understanding. I thought John was commenting on the medical establishment attacking the community hospital.
John is making an analogy between charter schools today and the community hospital created in Oklahoma to meet the needs of the rural poor.
Gotcha. Thank you. Eva and critical public service? Ha!
I doubt Eva has devoted her life to this for selfish motives, but you’re deflecting in any case. The parallels are obvious.
Dr. Michael Shahid created a community hospital to serve those who could not afford medical care. I don’t see his selflessness and courage as similar to the self-promoting hucksters now creating fly by night charter schools.
No, and I imagine there were a couple of hucksters trying to do community hospital scams too. But by and large, charter schools exist because economically disadvantaged families choose them (let’s go with data here, not anecdote) and their enemies protect the status quo for their financial interests. Pretty clear to me.
John,
There have been scores of charter scandals involving embezzlement and self-dealing.
I am an enemy of privatization and charters.
Please explain my financial self-interest in opposing the DeVos agenda.
Don’t dodge the question. What is my financial self interest in criticizing charters?
I don’t believe you have a financial self-interest, but many do. You apparently believe I have one and ascribe self-interest to pretty much everyone involved in charters schools, correct? School leaders who have devoted their lives to public education, volunteer Boards, teachers that put in long hours because they believe in the mission are portrayed as naive and being taken advantage of, etc. all get no credit from you if they are at charters.
It’s clear from what school districts say that they are way more concerned with losing $ to charters than losing students to them.
You wrote that “enemies” of charter schools have a financial self interest. According to the rightwing libertarian Tom Sowell, I am foremost among the enemies. Yet I think you admit that I have no such self interest. The rightwing charter advocate Jeanne Allen made the ridiculous claim on Twitter that “the union” paid for my house. Of course she had no evidence because it was a lie.
The charter industry is rife with self interest and self-dealing. Where else would a school leader with no credentials be paid $500,000-$5 million a year? In what public school district did the superintendent make off with $50 million like the charter leader of the A3 chain in California? How many schools have a private CEO who makes millions supplying goods and services to “his” charter like the Chester County Community School? I could go on all day but I won’t because the examples of charter fraud are too numerous and my life is too short.
“It’s clear from what school districts say that they are way more concerned with losing $ to charters than losing students to them.”
Ah, the self interested critics are school districts!? Of course they are concerned about losing money! I’m not interested in my tax dollars funding private schools. You are essentially saying that tax payers who fund the public school system have some nefarious financial interest in seeing their tax dollars support public education. Or maybe you are referring to the teachers and maybe even some administrators who are only interested in maintaining their cushy jobs and lavish lifestyles. Why I’m surprised that people aren’t rushing to join the profession! What a silly comment!
Great quote – I couldn’t resist revising it to fit today.
I think this bunch supporting Donald Trump should be sat down so hard it would jar their ancestors for a hundred generations.
A great example of ‘the good old days’. There is, of course, no chance of establishing such a ‘community hospital’ today.
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the community hospital was taken over by a for-profit corporation that closed it. No money to be made.
Doctors were reluctant to work for the Community Hospital if it meant defying the medical establishment.
Money is what matters. Alternative treatments that work are also given a bad name. Healing doesn’t bring in money.
RE: “community hospitals,” another note on how people do things in other countries. But this anecdote is 50 yrs old so who knows if it’s still true.
My longtime & wonderful therapist (now deceased) started as an lpn & added umpty-ump degrees and experiences. Among them: in the ’60’s she ran a small hospital in Kenya. She explained how rural African hospitals worked as a counter-lesson to American hospitals, which she viewed as economically unviable. Every single patient who required medical service arrived with a relative carrying a huge bag of rice (or some equivalent contribution to feeding patient, self, & others), prepared to remain at the patient’s bedside until spelled by another family member, for the duration of the patient’s stay. The patient’s relative slept on the floor there, and didn’t just handhold. They performed low-skilled nursing/aide functions and cleaning/ sanitization of patient’s space under direction of a skeleton crew of floor nurses.
Didn’t Blue Cross/Blue Shield use to be a cooperative?