On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.
Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
This video is from a film by my friend Pete Nicks, who is the guy with the camera in my banner image, above. The film, The Waiting Room, is a timely documentary about our health care system, as seen at The Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, CA.
THE WAITING ROOM will follow three people waiting in their own way: Wright Lassiter, the hospital’s CEO, who is struggling to run an under-funded public hospital while waiting for the health care system to change, Lydia Vasquez, a young uninsured woman waiting for the birth of her first child, and Kevin Washington, a young uninsured man who has slipped through the cracks, waiting for a miracle after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. These narratives will be punctuated by content interstitials culled from the social media space, both user-generated and produced: videos submitted online, blog posts cinematically dramatized, conversations between patients and policy makers in Washington, DC, photos and stories from the front lines of the hospital waiting room.
It’s not just a film; it’s a project. Read the rest to find out more about it.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 24, 2009 at 2:31 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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