The Hospital Quotes

“He was uncomfortable seeing so many Muslims in one place, “but I have Muslim friends I talk to here and there. Again, it’s one of them things: people get angry about race and things, but it’s just understanding somebody’s culture, where they come from, their background. I mean, knowledge is everything. Ignorance is nothing.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Foster had misread Ennen. Change was part of his agenda, and it had been since he assumed the CEO job. But he believed that, like an experienced comic, he knew his audience. Abrupt change was neither the Bryan way nor the CHWC way. It was certainly not in keeping with the hospital’s family ethos. So, as with the vaccine policy, Ennen preferred to execute change gradually whenever possible, in a person-to-person way, and with a minimum of drama. Foster viewed this as conflict avoidance; Ennen viewed it as tactical prudence.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“The very day the WCTU announced the list of committee members, the county fair in Montpelier, the biggest event in the county by far during the 1920s, opened its gates. There, for the first time in its history—and like many other county and state fairs at the time—the fair held a eugenics-inspired healthy children contest. Just as cows, pigs, and sheep were judged, kids in two classes, ages two to six and six to fourteen, were weighed and measured. Judges examined their teeth, hair, skin, posture, hearts, lungs, noses, and throats. The winning children in each age group received $5.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“month waiting list. And Parkview doctors weren’t much happier with the center, Sunderhaus believed, “because they’re charging hospital outpatients for everything. And their job in Bryan is to refer those patients to big services in Fort Wayne. Their job is merely as a feeder site for testing. And for their specialists. That is their only purpose for having family practice there, to feed their beast. Feed the beast of the MRI, the CAT scan machine. They keep track of those docs: how much they prescribe, how many tests they ordered. That’s how they decide who gets bonuses and who gets big bucks. Yeah! We piss everybody off!”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“When pneumonia or typhoid strikes down a breadwinner or when a major surgical operation becomes necessary, poverty may soon knock on the door,” the New York Times opined.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Pieces of plastic and paper and sections of tube floated to the floor: a snow of medical garbage.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“The same situation applied to working-class people in big cities. “Health is, for the most part, a commodity which can be purchased,” Matthew Sloan, president of the New York Edison Company—a utility company and one of the nation’s major employers—said in 1929. “The difficulty now is that its cost is beyond the reach of a great majority of people.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Working-class wages in the United States just about flatlined from 1979 to 2017. Over that thirty-seven years, the bottom 10 percent of earners saw a 4.1 percent rise in wages. Meanwhile, economic productivity rose 70 percent. Most of the reward for that productivity was scooped up by the top 5 percent of earners, who enjoyed a 69.3 percent rise in real wages. The top 0.1 percent increased their haul by over 343 percent.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Though Menard believed himself a self-made man, he and the company he controlled craved corporate welfare. After”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Perhaps even more than he hated environmental laws, Menard hated labor unions. “The Manager’s income shall be automatically reduced by sixty percent (60%) of what it would have been if a union of any type is recognized within your particular operation during the term of this Agreement,” read an employment contract managers were required to sign. “If a union wins an election during this time, your income will automatically be reduced by sixty percent (60%).”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“And in some towns benefactors donated money for hospitals just as Andrew Carnegie built libraries. (Bryan took Carnegie’s money to build its library in 1903.)”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“Them old Dutchmen, them old Germans—they’d work all day in a factory in Bryan, then head home to work on the farm. It was like they couldn’t be sure the factory would last, and they wanted to hang on to the farm, just in case—because a farm is forever,”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“always be in tension with the other. To make matters worse, the board, a huddle of local pooh-bahs,”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

“By 1926, medical costs had become a pressing national issue. “When pneumonia or typhoid strikes down a breadwinner or when a major surgical operation becomes necessary, poverty may soon knock on the door,” the New York Times opined.”
― Brian Alexander, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town