Dr. Patrick Dean has pulled off a magic trick to make Houdini proud.
The founder and president of GI Pathology, a national testing laboratory based in Memphis, Dean has practiced medicine without a license in at least two states. Practicing without a license is often a career killer for a physician. Not so with Dean.
This piece looks at the only majority-black nursing home in Illinois that earned the highest possible rating from Nursing Home Compare. The home is also noteworthy because it received that mark while having more than 85 percent of resident care paid for by Medicaid.
This story distills a national analysis of nursing home data and finds that Illinois is the worst state in the country for black seniors seeking nursing home. Illinois has the highest number of poorly rated majority black facilities in the country and just one black nursing home that received an excellent rating from Nursing Home Compare.
We looked at black and white homes where a high percentage of resident care was paid for by Medicaid and found that the disparities between the two groups actually increased, rather than shrunk as some owners with whom we had spoken predicted.
We continue our 5-part series on the high cost of health care in America.
