OSF's Charity Assistance Did Not Include Jean-Baptiste

The following is from the Children's Hospital of Illinois website. Jackson Jean- Baptiste was denied care at Children's Hospital.

Jackson is buried in Goodfield, Illinois.


Charity Assistance
(309) 686-6700
(800) 421-5700

Dear Patient:

The philosophy of OSF HealthCare is that all people have a right to receive needed health care. Our doors are open to persons of every faith and ethnic background regardless of their ability to pay.

We provide help to patients in obtaining payment from third parties such as Medicaid and Medicare. If you are eligible for Medicaid, and you are not currently signed up, we can help you apply.

We also offer charity assistance for medically necessary healthcare services to persons who meet our financial terms provided they submit the needed documents. OSF Charity Assistance may be applied for when there is a balance still due on an account after we have received payment from third party payers (like Medicaid, Medicare or an insurance company) and you feel you cannot pay the full balance.

The PDF form available through the link below must be completed and signed by you. We use income guidelines established by the U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services to determine if you are eligible for charity care. We do verify assets regarding your eligibility. So, please provide all the information promptly so we may try to help you as quickly as possible.

For more information, please call your patient accounts representative between the hours of 8am and 4:30pm Monday through Friday at 309-686-6700 or 800-421-5700.

OSF HealthCare offers high quality healthcare and we were pleased to provide that to your family. We look forward to working with you further to make sure the financial aspects of your care are handled in the same high quality way.

Sincerely,
The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis

Click below to download or print the OSF Charity Assistance PDF form.

English Version
Spanish Version










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Madame Therese

The lady in the photo holding the baby is Madame Therese. She remembers growing up in the Les Cayes area in southern Haiti. Her life was good.

Her family had a garden and they had enough to eat. They were happy. A bag of cement was not near as expensive as it is today.

She lives in Port-au-Prince now. She is afraid now. She was never afraid while she was growing up.

Notice her eyes are glistening. Madame Therese prays five times per day for her family and for Haiti. She still has hope for Haiti.

I believe the Madame Therese's of the world keep the world afloat. She is filled with faith. It is not the politicians or monsignors that are keeping Haiti from sinking into the ocean; it is Madame Therese.


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

"Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other poeple won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

"It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we uncounsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Marianne Williamson

Vicarious Grief

"According to Chochinov, there are a couple of catches to vicarious grief. The less the victims resemble us, the less grief we feel. And we don't seem to feel this grief as acutely for those who suffer from chronic problems, which often have their common denominator in poverty."

Maria King Carroll

Gorillas Receive Better Care than Haitians

Gorillas in Brookfield Zoo near Chicago receive much better care than most Haitians in Haiti.

First of all, the gorillas are fed every day. And they drink clean water. Gorillas don’t worry about when their next meal will be. On the contrary, the majority of Haitians are obsessed every day obtaining any food or clean water for their families.

Gorillas are moved between zoos in the United States for breeding purposes. We want to protect the future of their species. When Haitians flee the poverty in Haiti in pathetic boats and wash up on our shore, we return them to their island of misery. We don’t seem as concerned about their future.

When gorillas become ill, they receive much better medical care than the Haitians trapped in the slum or living in Haiti’s vast barren mountain ranges.

A gorilla named Chicory at the Brookfield Zoo displayed neurologic signs. An MRI was promptly done which revealed a large brain tumor on the right side. The brain tumor was removed and Chicory made a complete recovery.

When a poor Haitian gets a brain tumor, he doesn't get an MRI or surgery. He dies.

Heart disease affects many gorillas. The picture shows a gorilla's echocardiogram. Obtaining an echocardiogram and surgery for Haitian children dying of congential heart disease is much more difficult than it would be for a gorilla living near Chicago.

Maxime, Jackson, and Peoria's Makeover

Maxime, in front of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, December, 2006.

Haitian kids like Maxime and Jackson continue to die while Peoria will spend an estimated $850 million during the next 10 years to "makeover" their two main medical center campuses. The medical centers are located one block from each other.

See editoral in the Peoria Journal Star regarding this expansion. Also, note that no mention is made of Maxime or Jackson.

Haiti, MINUSTAH, and Latin America: Solidaridad?

Please go to IRC Americas Program to see a recent article by Mario Joseph and Brian Concannon, Jr.

Justice and Injustice

Liberation theologists theory of justice begins from the experience of injustice. It is rooted in reflection on the dismal poverty that submerges the majority of Latin Americans in conditions of inhuman wretchedness.

“Justice, says Sobrino, takes seriously the primordial fact of the created world in its given form; that is to say, it takes seriously the existence of the oppressed majorities. The existence of these majorities is not a fact that can be lightly passed over in speaking of the essence of the Christian message.”

Likewise, Segundo Galilea asserts that the starting point of liberation theology’s reflection is the present situation, in which “the vast majority of Latin Americans live in a state of underdevelopment and unjust dependence.”

Justice, the liberationists insist, demands that conflict be brought into the open and faced, not subsumed or denied.

Justice demands that one enter the fray, that one enter into conflict and choose sides for some and against others. As Gutierrez observes, those who seek justice cannot avoid conflict because in a society scarred by injustice and the exploitation of one social class by another, the proclamation of justice will transform history into something challenging and conflictual.

Social conflict is a reality that the liberationists, as long as they do not avert their eyes from the misery and squalor that surrounds them, cannot escape.

However, when liberationists highlight the connection between the struggle for justice and social conflict, they are not blessing conflict. They do not believe that justice can come only at the point of a sword or through the barrel of a gun. On the contrary social conflict is ultimately the product of sin; it is the historical consequence of collective sin.

Humanity need not live in conflict; persons do not need to oppress their sisters and brothers. Conflict need not be sublimated or denied; it can be resolved. The resolution of social conflict, in fact, is precisely why the liberationists give conflict such a prominent position in their work. They seek to resolve it by uncovering and then eliminating the cause for the conflict, namely injustice.

From “Liberation Theology After the End of History—The Refusal to Cease Suffering” by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

Haiti's Plague is Poverty

The Haitian baby to the right presented with seizures, fever, bulging tense fontanelle, primitive neurologic reflex at his right hand, and eye deviation to the right. He quickly became mottled and more lethargic. He was treated quickly with IM ceftriaxone and steroids. He was comatose for several days, but woke up and began interacting and eating. Most Haitian babies don't do this well with bacterial meningitis.

WHO estimates that about 1.6 million people, including up to 1 million children under 5 years old, die every year of pneumococcal pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. In populations with high child-mortality rates like Haiti, pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of mortality and accounts for about 20-25% of all child deaths. In these populations, Streptococcus pneumoniae is identified consistently as the leeading cause of bacterial pneumonia, and pneumoccal bacteremia is an important cause of child mortality. HIV infection increases risk for pneumococcal disease 20-40 fold, and antibiotic resistance makes threatment difficult and expensive. Thus pneumococcal idsease is a major global-health issue.

Haitian poor children are only given the standard vaccines. They do not get pneumococcal vaccines. If any group of children need the pneumoccal vaccines it is the Haitian children.

Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines can prevent most serious pneumoccal disease. The seven to 13 serotypes included in conjugate pneumoccal vaccines are expected to prevent 50-80% of all pediatric pneumococcal disease worldwide.

Also, the decline in disease in unvaccinated people is accounted for by the reduction in colonisation in vaccinated children and thus decreased transmission to unvaccinated contacts. In the USA, this herd immunity effect prevents twice as many cases as the direct effects of vaccination alone.

Based on studies done in Africa, there is a compelling case for giving pneumoccal vaccination in Haiti. Pneumococcal invasive disease, pneumonia, and meningitis, and a decrease in all cause mortality has been documented.

What are we waiting for?


"Many fledging moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming that there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its consclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unendng separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical."

---From The Plague, by Albert Camus

Tuberculosis

Consider these facts regarding tuberculosis:

1. Tuberculosis kills 2,000,000 people each year around the world. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death from a curable infectious disease.

2. The incidence rate is highest among young men.

3. The incidence of tuberculosis in the United States was 4.6/100,000 people in 2006.

4. The incidence of tuberculosis in Haiti was 306/100,000 people. 6,000 Haitians die from tuberculosis each year. Haiti's incidence of tuberculosis rivals Africa, which has the highest incidence in the world.

5. Haiti is 90 minutes (by air) from the richest and most powerful nation in the history of man.


"The history of tuberculosis is one of scientific, medical, and political failure. Although modern short-course treatment for tuberculosis is among the most effective and inexpensive of treatments for life threatening diseases, tuberculosis remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide."

"Turning the Tide Against Tuberculosis"--Lancet 2006; 367:877-878

Peoria's Headlines

During the last several days, the headlines of several articles in the Peoria Journal Star have been about Peoria's medical center's expansions.

"Saint Francis Vision Goes Sky High"(March 31, 2007) is an article about OSF's Life Flight air transport using its new 4.3 million dollar helipad for patient transfers to St. Francis. OSF is planning on spending about $500 million dollars on building projects over the next several years.)

Another article the same day was headlined,"Methodist Unveils Vision for $350 Million Renovation". Methodist Medical Center is one block down the street from OSF. "You can't provide 21st century health care in early 20th century buildings," CEO Michael Bryant told the Downtown Rotary Club.

Today (April 3, 2007) a small article was titled, "101 Haitians Who Landed in Florida Likely to be Deported". The article reported," The United States will probably deport most if not all of the 101 Haitian migrants who landed off a South florida beach last week, a U.S. legislator said Monday, warning other not to risk the dangerous voyage.

"The 101 Haitians, many looking gaunt and exhausted, came ashore Wednesday north of Miami after spending at least three weeks at sea in a dilapidated sailboat. One man died in the crossing and three were taken to the hospital in critical condition."

The articles in the Peoria paper describe the incredible wealth in our world and the incredible hopelessness in the other world.

I have stood on the beaches along the western and southern shores of Haiti and have shuddered at the thought of getting in a "dilapidated sailboat" and leaving. The waters crash into the shore and seem to say, "Don't even think about leaving here." But many courageous Haitians do. They think they have no choice.

We hear of the boat people that make it to our shores, but never hear of the ones that the ocean swallows and delivers them from their misery in Haiti.

Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord make me
an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred,
Let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, Joy.
O divine Master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled
As to console;
To be understood,
As to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
And it is in dying that we are
Born to eternal life.
Amen.

Just think if everyone who had any interaction with the Haitian people said this prayer each morning. It would render so much good will and positive actions. There would be so little time wasted with nonsense that keeps the people poor and voiceless. Haitian people would be educated, paid well, and could drink clean water. None of the gran mange anywhere in the world would suffer---they would benefit. The slums could be torn down and Haiti's "boat people" wouldn't want to leave the Pearl of the Antilles. Who would want to?

MINUSTAH could go home and the Diaspora could come back. And the streets of Port-au-Prince could be safely walked in at night.

Why is this so difficult?

A Deafening Cry

(Father Gerry Jean-Juste with parishoner at St. Clare's Church, Port-au-Prince, 2005.)

Perhaps the single most significant event to give impetus to the rise of liberation theology was the Second General conference of Latin American Bishops that met in August of 1968 in Medellin, Colombia. This meeting has been called the “Magna Carta” of liberation theology.

One of the documents on poverty from this conference, written by the bishops, stated the following:

“The Latin American bishops cannot remain indifferent in the face of the tremendous social injustices existent in Latin America, which keep the majority of our peoples in dismal poverty, which in many cases becomes inhuman wretchedness. A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men, asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else.”

According to the documents from Medellin, the situation in Latin America was characterized by “institutionalized violence,” “unjust structures,” “internal colonialism,” and “external neocolonialism.” Together these amount to a “sinful situation” that leaves the Latin American countries dependent on the economic centers of power. In light of this situation, the bishops called for “ an all embracing, courageous, urgent, and profoundly renovating transformation.” The Church was called to “create an eminently Christian task.” The bishops commit the Church to a program of a “new society” in which the human person is “an agent of his own history.” The Church was encouraged to carry Christ’s message of liberation to the poor by becoming a poor Church, by being in solidatrity with the poor and giving “preference to the poorest and most needy sectors.”

In 1971 Gustaveo Gutierrez’s book was written. “A Theology of Liberation” remains the classic statement of the ecclesiological issues at stake in the rise of liberation theology. Critics charged that liberationists were guilty of reducing Christianity to a political ideology—in effect attending to this world while ignoring more “spiritual” concerns proper to the world to come.

Gutierrez wrote in an essay after publication of his book the following:

“One of the oldest themes in the theology of liberation is the totality and complexity of the liberation process. This theology conceives total liberation as a single process, within which it is necessary to distinguish different dimensions or levels: economic liberation, social liberation, political liberation, liberation of the human being from all manner of servitude, liberation from sin, communion with God as the ultimate basis of a human community of brothers and sisters.”

Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit priest in El Salvador, was recently criticized (2007) by the Vatican. Fr. Sobrino is a Spanish born priest and a well known proponent of liberation theology. The Vatican explained, “Father Sobrino manifests a preoccupation for the poor and the oppressed, particularly in Latin America. This preoccupation certainly is shared by the whole church.” The Vatican stated that the church cannot express its preferential option for the poor through “reductive sociological and ideological categories.”

Sobrino has written, “There is terrible injustice in today’s world, one which, slowly or quickly, brings the great majority of humanity closer to death. Justice and truth, therefore, are fundamental and urgent demands.”

According to liberationists, justice is the key concept for the Christian conscience of our day; the promotion of justice is the essential requirement of the Gospel message today. Gutierrez writes, “When justice does not exit, God is not known; God is absent.”

So maybe God IS absent in Haiti. Maybe God is not known here because there sure is very little justice in Haiti.

There also is no justice for Haiti’s Fr. Gerry Jean-Juste. The very priest who lived his life standing up for the poor, and feeding the poor in his parish, is in “exile” once again in Florida. His story is well known. Haiti and his parishioners really need him back.

The aging Latin American priests philosophy of preferential option for the poor wasn't wrong. It is the right and fair thing to do. But when the Jean-Justes of the world are terrorized and shackled and marginated and condemned of crimes they didn’t commit, the poor don't have any option. And when the Church leaders themselves don’t advocate for Jean-Juste, the injustice continues. Ignoring Jean-Juste is ignoring Haiti's "deafening cry" today.

Does this young boy pictured below, living with his family in rural Croix-du-Bouquets, look like he has many options?

(See "Liberation Theology After the End of History--The Refusal to Cease Suffering", by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.)

Disorderly Parts

"We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out."

William James

Toussaint Louverture

"Does anyone think that men who have enjoyed the benefits of freedom would look on calmly while it is stripped from them? They bore their chains as long as they knew no better way of life than slavery. But today when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than to be again reduced to slavery....We knew how to face a danger to win our liberty; we will know how to face death to keep it."

Toussaint Louverture

Aristide and Education

"Previous governments (in Haiti) never seriously tried to invest in education, and it's clear that our program was always going to be a threat to the status quo. The elite want nothing to do with popular education, for obvious reasons. Again it comes down to this: we can either set out from a position of genuine freedom and independence and work to create a country that respects the dignity of all of its people, or else we will have to accept a position of servile dependence, a country in which the dignity of ordinary people counts for nothing. This is what is at store here."

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 2006

The First Class Parking Deck

The Peoria Journal Star had an article on March 21, 2007 regarding OSF’s new parking deck. It is an 1,800-spot visitor and patient parking deck. The article reports it is the largest parking deck in Peoria. The deck’s features will include valet service that includes free paring and shuttle cart transportation to the main buildings, as well as heated and air-conditioned stairwells.

The new parking deck costs $37 million dollars. This will accompany the Milestone Project which is OSF’s new 440,000 square foot expansion which will cost $234 million dollars. This Project will include an eight story building with a new Children’s Hospital, as well as an adult cardiac unit, and new emergency and surgery departments.

It is Peoria’s largest building venture ever.

Chris Lofgren, OSF’s spokesman stated, “One of our goals is to eventually have all private rooms. He also noted that OSF is one the verge of acquiring a FOURTH helicopter.

Now consider this:

1. OSF continues to reject former Haitian Hearts/OSF patients for surgery with partial or complete funds offered for their surgeries by Haitian Hearts.

2. Revenues for OSF are in excess of 1.5 billion dollars per year.

3. Revenues for the entire Republic of Haiti in 2003, with a population of 8.3 million people, was less than $300 million dollars.

4. There is approximately 1 physician/6000 people in Haiti’s rural areas. There is 1 physician/400 people in the United States. 40% of Haiti's population has no access to primary health care.

5. Haiti has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the western Hemisphere. Haiti is located 90 minutes from Miami by air.

6. 25% of Haitian children are chronically malnourished.

7. Only 50% of Haitian children are vaccinated with the standard vaccines.

8. 75% of births in Haiti are accompanied by non-qualified personnel.

9. There are many Haitian children born with congenital heart disease or who acquire rheumatic heart disease and need surgery. Cardiac surgery is not routinely done in Haiti and never done through the Haitian government for charges that the poor can afford. Serious heart disease in children and adults is virtually a death sentence.


The Journal Star article ended with Lofgren stating that while OSF works on its new project, visitors and patients can enjoy the new deck and its valet services.

“Because of the size of (the deck), it is the right thing to do,” Lofgren said beaming. “This is first class, all the way.”

The "Brutal" Society?

In my opinion, Haitians are very patient people. They suffer everyday in all ways imaginable. I wonder how North Americans would act in the same horrific circumstances. I wonder how I would act.

Fifty years ago Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote a book "Compere General Soleil" (General Sun, My Brother). Alexis described a neigborhood in Port-au-Prince in the following fashion:

"In this neighborhood, everbody lived on the street. The people were simple, plain and generous. But when you touched what was theirs, they fell into a rage. Misery had made them intractable on that. They lived on the borderline between instinct and intelligence. They were the products of a society that brutalizes people to a level of semi-animal existence, oriented towards their immediate and constant concern: food. Everything was transformed or deformed by an empty stomach; love, pride, willpower, and tenderness. Lit up by the naked sunlight, their only entertainment was the theater, music hall and cinema of the bustling, noisy street....What other joy could they take in life except to laugh excessively at anything---the quarrels, the street and the fleeting intoxication of a few popular holidays." (Notes from the
Last Testament--The Struggle for Haiti, Michael Deibert).

I wonder what Alexis would write if he strolled through La Saline or Cite Soleil today?

The main stream media enjoys depicting the brutality in Haiti. However, poverty causes hunger and hunger causes desperation. And I have seen much more laughing in Haiti than brutal people. Doesn't that say something good and admirable about the Haitian people?

Food Insecurity Equals Madness

I call it the "belt sign". At a well-known tuberculosis hospital in Port-au-Prince, when men get on the scales to be weighed, their leather belts frequently wrap all the way around to the middle of their backs. They are not only sick--they don't have enough to eat. And many have AIDS.

In Haiti and many "developing" countries, starvation and malnutrition are hurting the fight against AIDS. Food is replacing drugs as the biggest need.

The Associated Press reported that the "U.N. World Food Program has launched nutrition programs in Haiti and 50 other countries with the worst HIV rates, providing monthly food supplements for patients and their families. Without adequate nutrition, AIDS suffers cannot absorb the drugs needed to slow the virus.

"Worldwide, an estimated 3.8 million people with AIDS needed food support this year, possible rising to 6.4 million by 2008, according to the World Food Program."

The British journal HIV Medicine had a study that concluded hungry people are six times more likely to die when taking AIDS medication than those with good nutrition.

Can you imagine not providing enough to eat in the developed world for people that were suffering from AIDS? The Associated Press article stated that Stephen Lewis, special U.N. envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, called the lack of funding for food (for people with AIDS) "madness". Health workers in the "developing" world must view food security as being no less important to a person's health than the right drugs and regular checkups.

(The young lady pictured has AIDS and lives in Cite Soleil. She doesn't get enough to eat either.)

"God comes to the hungry in the form of food."
Mahatma Ghandi

Mountains Behind Mountains

"In Haiti they have a saying, "deye mon gen mon". Beyond the mountains there are more mountains--a beautiful expression, not only of hope and struggle, but of lineage, of history, of ebbing of tides, the passing of clouds and breaths of thick wind covering the mountain ranges. They also have another saying. Bay kou, bliye. Pote mak, sonje. The one who gives the blow, forgets. The one who suffers the hurt, remembers." (Notes from the Last Testament--The Struggle for Haiti, Michael Deibert)

The man in this photo was patiently seated in the waiting room at Saint Catherine's Hospital in Cite Soleil in January. Just one hundred yards from him were young men running with guns, tires were burning in the street, and MINUSTAH was on their daily hunt. And this was at noon.

How much more can the Haitians take? People outside of Haiti like to characterize the Haitians as tough. They are tough but not tough enough if you look at their infant and maternal mortality rates, and their life expectancy, and stare in their faces as they strangle on their blood coughed from their tubercular lungs.

Haiti Breaks Everyone's Back

This Haitian boy has Pott's disease. He has tuberculosis of the vertebral bodies in his thoracic spine which causes the bone to become infected and collapse. He will be a "hunchback" forever.

Whenever there is a case of PEDIATRIC tuberculosis in a community it means that there is an unidagnosed case of ADULT tuberculosis. As a rule, children are noninfectious, but adults are. Such is the case in Haiti where tuberculosis runs rampant in the adult and pediatric populations.