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.
Immigration has been the focus of much debate during this election season and has been one of the animating issues behind the rise of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. Democratic and Republican voters are deeply split over how they view the issue and which candidate they believe is best fit to address it. National polls show GOP voters generally consider illegal immigration to be a more important issue than Democratic voters do.
Presidential candidates in both parties are proposing changes to international trade policies that could have dramatic impacts not only on the United States in general, but also on busy trade centers like Maryland.
As of January, 36 in-state organizations were authorized to pay just over 3,600 workers with disabilities less than the minimum wage, according to a legislative analysis. But the Minimum Wage and Community Integration Act — a pair of bills that passed both the Maryland House and Senate with wide, bipartisan majorities — aims to end that practice.
The Maryland House of Delegates voted along party lines Thursday to override both of Gov. Larry Hogan’s vetoes this session, a move that reflects the sometimes tense relations between the Republican governor and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly.
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