The Ebola scare in Dallas saturated national and international media coverage in recent weeks. From some quarters, the reaction was concern that incessant, panic-driven news coverage would damage our city’s image.
But maybe we should spend less worry on our image and more on the realities of life for the nearly one-half of Dallas residents who live in low-income households, defined as those who survive below 185 percent of the poverty level.
Poverty has taken a very deep hold on Dallas, and it was painfully evident during the attention given Dallas over the past several weeks. We didn’t see the images we are accustomed to seeing — gleaming downtown skyscrapers, the magnificent Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge or the parks and buildings in the Arts District.
Instead, we saw row after row of aging apartment complexes in Vickery Meadow, one of Dallas’ 32 neighborhoods of concentrated poverty — where the poverty rate exceeds 40 percent. For those outside of Dallas, the scenes looked very much like the poorest neighborhoods in an old East Coast city.
Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola victim diagnosed in the U.S., began his journey into the health care system by doing what hundreds of thousands of uninsured and poor Dallasites do every year: He went to an emergency room. Given the enactment of the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires virtually all hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment for patients with emergency medical conditions regardless of their ability to pay, the emergency room is now indeed the safety net for some of our most vulnerable residents.
One need only look at the experiences of Parkland Memorial Hospital and Children’s Medical Center to learn how our health care infrastructure has been affected by the high poverty rate in Dallas.
Parkland and Children’s are safety-net hospitals, providing care to the indigent and those on governmental programs, such as Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Both have among the busiest emergency rooms in the nation. Parkland alone had more than 243,000 emergency visits in fiscal year 2013. Dr. Fred Cerise, the president and CEO of Parkland, recently pointed out that, after Miami-Dade County, Dallas has the largest percentage of uninsured residents of any urban county in the nation.
Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released data on income and poverty for 2013. The banner headline was that the U.S. poverty rate declined for the first time since 2006, from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013. Regretfully, this was not our reality in Dallas. Our poverty rate went up, from 23.9 percent to 24.4 percent. Our child poverty rate also increased — from 37.6 percent to 37.9 percent — while the national rate fell to under 20 percent.
The scenes surrounding the Ebola crisis should be a wake-up call in Dallas, a city that I have previously described as the Doughnut City — an island of haves surrounded by a sea of have-nots.
Our entire community should pledge that Dallas can do better and implement a systemic approach to reducing the rate of poverty in Dallas. It is the right thing to do.
Attorney and community leader Regina Montoya is co-chair of Mayor Mike Rawlings’ Task Force on Poverty. Reach her by email at reginamontoya@post.harvard.edu
