After the 2010 elections, it seemed a safe bet that the District would continue its 12-year streak without a major political scandal. The image of a city run by a crack-smoking mayor was a distant memory, no longer visible in the rearview mirror as successive mayors drove the District on the road to municipal respectability.

Washingtonians took pride in their city’s improved reputation, particularly longtime black residents who lived through the embarrassing arrest of former mayor Marion Barry on drug charges.

The civic pride began diminishing in the past few months, after D.C. Council members Harry Thomas Jr. and Kwame R. Brown, both Democrats, were forced to resign. It came to screeching halt when a federal investigation implicated that three political aides to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) were involved in a scheme involving boatloads of illicit campaign contributions and irregularities. Everyone is waiting to see whether Gray will be charged next.

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“People who have a local perspective, rather than a larger perspective, view everything bad that happens in the District as a negative thing about them,” said David Bositis, a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a D.C.-based think tank focused on political and public policy issues.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Escalated hospital closures in urban communities are raising concern about whether minorities can receive quality health care, especially trauma treatment, when emergency care facilities are miles from their neighborhoods.

Public officials in Cleveland and neighboring East Cleveland are waging a legal dispute with the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which sought to close a local trauma center. Other municipalities nationwide are taking steps to prevent hospitals from closing or moving to wealthier suburbs.

Public health advocates have long decried the steady closures of so-called safety-net hospitals in communities populated by low- or moderate-income people of color. For at least three decades, these advocates have joined community activists, social scientists and beleaguered city and county officials in warning that this trend threatens health outcomes in communities that need hospitals most.

“This problem has been escalating dramatically and is a consequence of a system where health care is a market commodity that is bought and sold by those who can afford it,” said Brian D. Smedley, vice president and director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C.

The struggle of lower-income people, he continued, “will escalate as the health care crisis worsens and a population that has higher health care needs and problems gets worse and worse and ends up in emergency rooms to get treatment at much greater costs that we all will have to bear.”

Read more at New America Media.