LISTEN: GPB's Peter Biello speaks with ProPublica reporter Ginger Thompson about her five-part investigation into Phoebe Putney's relationship with the community it serves.
A new five-part investigative series by ProPublica looks into vast health care access disparities in the city of Albany. Reporter Ginger Thompson spoke with GPB's Peter Biello about her reporting on Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital.
Peter Biello: This series of stories is broadly about inequalities in health care access. Specifically, it's about how that works in the city of Albany. How did that become the place for you to crack open that topic?
Ginger Thompson: I first went to Albany in 2020 when a lot of other reporters were thinking about Albany. The pandemic had hit the country, and out of nowhere, Albany became the fourth biggest hotspot in the world behind Wuhan, China and New York City. And I think the world was surprised by it. Albany was surprised to have found itself in that position. And I'm a longtime foreign correspondent. I parachute into places that are in crisis all the time. And so when I saw this happening in Albany, that's exactly what I intended to do: go to this place and write about COVID and the communities.
Peter Biello: But when you got there you found that Albany to some extent acted as a microcosm for the rest of the country's relationship to health care.
Ginger Thompson: So I looked as much at the place as I did at the pandemic. And when you start to just look at Albany and say, "What is this place?" you learn quickly that it has some of the highest rates of chronic conditions in Georgia. So COVID was terrible, epic and devastating. But the reason that the community was so vulnerable to COVID was because it had been so sick in the first place. And then you see that the dominant institution in Albany — politically, economically, and certainly as it concerns health care — is a hospital, Phoebe Putney Memorial, which had grown in the last three decades from a small sort of county-run facility into the flagship of a sprawling health system. And so while so much about Albany had been on a decline for three decades, Phoebe Putney Memorial had been on an ascent. And what I wanted to know was: how are those two things connected? And I thought if I could answer some of the questions, they were questions that went beyond Albany, and that would speak to the health care system.
Peter Biello: This series has a lot of experts and community leaders passing through it, a lot of history, and one story stands out in your reporting. The constant is the story of Dr. Anthony Parker and his wife, Sandra. Sandra shares a little bit about their experience.
Sandra Parker: We still have questions, no doubt. He went in for an ablation and he's not here with us anymore. He would want to make sure that whatever happened doesn't happen again. So I hope that the problems can be fixed, because Phoebe's all that Albany has.
Peter Biello: Yes.
Ginger Thompson: What was so moving to me about the Parker family and what happened to the Parker family is that if anyone should get good care at Phoebe Putney Memorial, it is Dr. Anthony Parker. He was a part of the Phoebe family. He was one of the few African Americans invited to be on the board of the health system. He and his family had long years of a very close relationship with Phoebe and had every faith in it when they went through, when they went to this — to have this procedure, even though over the years they, too, had heard numerous horror stories from people that were close to them, their own close friends, co-workers. And so Phoebe is a very powerful institution in town. Albany is, as you described, a company town, and it Phoebe is sort of the GM of Albany, just the way that GM was in Detroit. And so very few people who have felt that they didn't get the care that they or their loved ones should have from Phoebe didn't have the power to fight it, didn't have the power to stand up against it. And Mrs. Parker did. And so telling her story was sort of the reason she stood out to me is because she, unlike so many others, could actually fight and did. And she allowed me to sort of follow her as she went through that fight.
Peter Biello: You reached out to the CEO of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, Scott Steiner, and had conversations with him. I wanna play a little bit of what he told you about why Phoebe approaches things the way that it does.
Scott Steiner "I think there's always a dilemma of 'How do we continue to serve our community if you can't pay for it?' That is part of our mission statement, that we provide that service regardless of race, religion, and the ability to pay. But we're always trying to balance that out to paying the bills because we don't get anything for free."
Peter Biello: So what do you make of his comments about how Phoebe runs the business?
Ginger Thompson: It's one of the most important parts of my many years of conversations with Scott Steiner and who I'm really grateful for how responsive he has been over the years to our reporting. You know, we — and I say this in the story — we as Americans, we cling to this idea of our health care system as a public service. And in many wealthy countries, it is just that. But in the United States, it's a business. First and foremost, it's a business. And while it's not like Home Depot — it's not selling 2x4s — it is a business. And another thing that Scott Steiner told me in that interview is that at a supermarket, if you're hungry, you can't just go into the store and fill up your cart and walk out without paying. And the same is true for hospitals. You go in and get services and sure, the mission is real. Providing care for everybody who walks in without regard for whether they can pay is a real thing. But even that has its limits if you, as a hospital, have bills to pay as well. And so what he is saying there is that: that this is a business and it has to make decisions that are good for the business if it's going to keep its doors open and serve anyone.
