Capital News Service

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.”

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.

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.