David A. Ansell

Last updated
David A. Ansell
Born1952 (age 72–73)
Occupations
  • Physician
  • health care manager

David A. Ansell (born 1952) is a Chicago-based physician, social epidemiologist and author. He is a supporter of single-payer health care and writes on the issue of health inequality in the United States. [1] [2] He spent seventeen years at Cook County Hospital (now the John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County) and wrote a memoir entitled, County: Life, Death, and Politics in Chicago’s Public Hospital.

Contents

Early years and education

David A. Ansell was born in 1952 and spent his formative years in Binghamton, New York. After high school, he attended Franklin and Marshall College (B.A., 1974) and medical school at the SUNY Upstate Medical University (M.D., 1978). He received his Masters of Public Health from the University of Illinois School of Public Health (1991). [3] After finishing medical school in 1978, Ansell trained at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital.

Career

Ansell served at Cook County Hospital as attending physician for 13 years, joining other physicians in a new Division of General Medicine/Primary Care.[ citation needed ] In the mid 1980s, Ansell and colleagues noted an increase in patient dumping, in which patients are transferred to public hospitals due to a lack of health insurance. In 1984, Ansell joined a project led by Robert Schiff to document patient dumping in Chicago. [4] The same year, he founded and directed the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program at Cook County Hospital, which he used to combat race-based disparity in health care.[ citation needed ] He contributed to an article critical of the practice, "Transfers to a Public Hospital", that appeared in the February 1986 edition of TheNew England Journal of Medicine. [5]

Ansell left Cook County Hospital in 1955 to become Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine of Mount Sinai Hospital, a private safety-net hospital in Chicago. Among other activities at Mount Sinai was the Sinai Urban Health Institute, [6] a major health-disparity research and intervention center which he founded in 2002 with Steven Whitman. In 2006, he and Whitman published an article documenting the racial breast cancer mortality gap in Chicago. In response, they joined with others to found the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce to combat this disparity. [7] [8] In 2015, Ansell helped found the DePaul-Rush Center for Community Health Equity a Chicago-based health equity educational and research center based at DePaul University and Rush University Medical Center. [9]

Leadership Positions

Published books

Ansell first book was entitled, County: Life, Death, and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital. In the book, Ansell tells the story of his patients and colleagues during his seventeen years as a resident and attending physician at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. County was released on July 1, 2011. The Wall Street Journal named it "one of the five best health books of 2011". [11] [12] [13] It was hailed as a "landmark book" by Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune , aiming "to inform and to inspire" readers about the disparities in health care. In the book, Ansell argues that only a single-payer solution that provides access to all US residents regardless of circumstances can provide relief for those closed out of the health care system. [14]

His second book is entitled The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017 [15] [16]

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Gaffney, Adam; Woolhandler, Steffie; Angell, Marcia; Himmelstein, David U. (June 2016). "Moving Forward From the Affordable Care Act to a Single-Payer System". American Journal of Public Health. 106 (6): 987–988. doi:10.2105/ajph.2015.303157. PMC   4880224 . PMID   27148891.
  2. ↑ "'Life, Death And Politics' Treating Chicago's Uninsured". NPR. Retrieved 18 October 2016.
  3. ↑ David A. Ansell (2013). County : life, death and politics at Chicago's public hospital (Second ed.). ISBN   978-0897337199.
  4. ↑ "Sick and wrong: Chronicle of Chicago's Public Hospital". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 18 October 2016.
  5. ↑ Schiff, R. L.; Ansell, D. A.; Schlosser, J. E.; Idris, A. H.; Morrison, A.; Whitman, S. (1986). "Transfers to a Public Hospital". New England Journal of Medicine. 314 (9): 552–557. doi:10.1056/nejm198602273140905. PMID   3945293.
  6. ↑ "About Sinai Urban Health Institute". Sinai Health System. Archived from the original on 20 October 2016. Retrieved 19 October 2016.
  7. ↑ "Welcome". Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce. Retrieved 19 October 2016.
  8. ↑ Hirschman, Jocelyn; Whitman, Steven; Ansell, David A. (2007). "The black: white disparity in breast cancer mortality: the example of Chicago". Cancer Causes & Control. 18 (3): 323–333. doi:10.1007/s10552-006-0102-y. PMID   17285262. S2CID   3349878.
  9. ↑ "Homepage". Center For Community Health Equity. Retrieved 19 October 2016.
  10. ↑ "David A. Ansell, MD, MPH". Rush University Medical Center. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
  11. ↑ "Sick and wrong: Chronicle of Chicago's Public Hospital". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
  12. ↑ "Their Zeal Changed Lives, if Not the System". New York Times. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
  13. ↑ "Healing Reads: The Year's Five Best Books". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
  14. ↑ "Sick and wrong: Chronicle of Chicago's Public Hospital". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 18 October 2016.
  15. ↑ Ansell, David A. (2017). The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills. University of Chicago PRess. ISBN   978-0-226-42829-1.
  16. ↑ "The Death Gap". The University Of Chicago Press. Archived from the original on 25 October 2016. Retrieved 24 October 2016.
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