LDI/CPHI Research Seminar with David Ansell, MD, MPH

David A. Ansell, MD MPH, is a Chicago based physician and health activist. In June 1978, Ansell and four med-school friends from Syracuse hopped into a 24 foot U-Haul van and trekked across country to Chicago, more specifically to train at Cook County Hospital – one of the nation’s most storied and notorious public hospitals. What they discovered was a building described by Scott Simon of NPR in 1994 “as huge, grey and battered as a vanquished and abandoned old battle ship run aground on the shattered streets just west of Chicago’s Loop,” and inside, “hallways thick with sick people who have also run aground and seem[ed] abandoned to waiting, limping, straining, coughing sighing and sweating, bleeding, crying.”

Ansell journeyed from the open wards of County to the hallowed halls of Congress where he testified to change American laws on patient dumping — the immoral and deadly practice of inter-hospital transfer of critically ill, uninsured patients. He developed one of the first programs in the US to battle racial disparity when he started the Breast Cancer Screening Program at Cook County Hospital. He started as an intern at County and stayed seventeen years. He now sits on the board of directors of that troubled health system.