Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

This is a post I wrote about Muriel Gillick's book, The Denial of Aging, when the health care reform debate was just getting going.

This post is about Michael Marmot's work that looks at status as a social determinant of health outcomes.

<p>This story provides families with a set of tips about how to find a high-quality nursing home for their loved one.</p>

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 piece discusses Donald McRae's book about the race to perform the first human heart transplant. McRae blends sciene, character description and culture in this engaging book.

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.

This piece looked at Paul Starr's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the social transformation of American medicine and explored how the issues he discusses can shed light on the current vituperative health care reform debate.

<p>We have created a Google Map with race, ratings, staffing, violations, lawsuits and elected official information for 92 nursing homes in the city. We just launched the map on Friday and are hoping that it will be useful to community residents, advocates and politicians. We welcome feedback on how we might improve our next map.</p>