This is Part One in the series, “Tracking Your Phone” by the Capital News Service. It examines how police use cell phone simulators to track phones, a practice originally designed for the battlefield, veiled in secrecy, and being challenged in court.
Health disparities in Baltimore are about a system that still treats too many residents in the most expensive way possible — in crisis visits to the emergency room — rather than keeping people healthy in the community.
In Sandtown, where Freddie Gray lived and the median household income is less than a quarter of Roland Park’s, the life expectancy is 70 years. That matches the average life expectancy in North Korea, an impoverished dictatorship where millions suffer from chronic undernourishment, according to the United Nations.
A former drug user, clean for 30 years, believes her past drug use — and doctors’ refusal to hear anything beyond that — was the main roadblock to an accurate diagnosis.
Bon Secours Hospital has been a fixture in the neighborhood since 1919, when it was opened by an order of nuns who served middle-class patients from all across the city. But today, few patients are affluent. The hospital, outpatient services and wellness center that compose the system primarily serve neighborhoods including Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park, predominantly black neighborhoods made famous in pop culture by TV shows like HBO’s “The Wire.”
Sharlene Adams’ story is not about huge barriers to medical care but about a series of hurdles that block access to help for her and many other low-income residents in Baltimore. Those hurdles add up to large health care inequities.
Residents of Baltimore’s poorer neighborhoods are plagued by rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and hypertension higher than in wealthier parts of the city. Those conditions lead to lives that are shorter and sicker than the lives of people who live in more affluent parts of town — evidence that the health care system is failing the city’s poor.
Six miles outside of Annapolis lie the decaying bones of a dinosaur. They don’t belong to a prehistoric animal, but to Crownsville Hospital Center, a mostly vacant former asylum that costs the State of Maryland around a million dollars a year. Many of the methods used to treat mental illness when Crownsville opened in 1911 have essentially gone extinct.
Democrat Chris Van Hollen Tuesday won a closely-fought primary battle for the Maryland Senate, easily defeating fellow House member Donna Edwards for the seat being vacated by Barbara Mikulski. Van Hollen had 53% of the Democratic vote to Edwards’ 39%.
A pair of longtime Maryland politicians — former Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown and state Sen. Jamie Raskin — defeated several strong challengers to become the Democratic nominees for the 4th and 8th U.S. Congressional Districts, respectively.
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