Reposted from S.F. BayView
Clinics serving Americabs most depressed area forced to close Jan. 1.
Legendary Baptist minister, physician, musician and activist Ronald V. Myers Sr., M.D., who logs 50,000 miles a year on muddy back roads bringing health care and hope to hundreds in the Mississippi Delta, may be forced to close his four clinics, in Tchula, Belzoni, Greenville and Indianola, on Jan. 1. His medical malpractice insurance company, though obligated to cover all physicians in the state, is canceling his insurance despite his never having had a claim filed against him.
Mississippibs controversial new tort reform legislation gave the company sole discretion as to which doctors it will insure. Dr. Myers charges the company is wrongly denying coverage to Black physicians practicing in poor, primarily Black communities. Contending he is a victim of bmedical malpractice lynching,b he filed suit Dec. 8 against the company, but it may be too late to keep the c>nics open.
Dr. Myers, 48, has the strong backing of his wife Sylvia, son Joshua and daughter Neoma, volunteer medical students who assist him and the communities he serves, where in his rare downtime, he plays jazz piano for charitable and community causes. And he is internet-savvy, maintaining three websites and sending email updates to a wide audience.
While public health officials felt Tchula, Miss., was too poor to support a doctor, Dr. Myers and his wife Sylvia established a health center there in 1989. Without any government grants or assistance, they went into debt renovating an abandoned restaurant into a modern health facility.
An email received just as the Bay View goes to press announces the good news that an interview with Dr. Myers will be broadcast on ABC's Good Morning America on Monday morning, Jan. 3. In the Bay Area, thatbs on Channel 7 from 7 to 9 a.m.
In an email sent Thursday, he says he wants the entire Black community to know babout the challenges facing Black physicians who serve their Black communities in private practice.
For example, my clinics in the Mississippi Delta, where the Black population in some of the counties my clinics are located in is 70-80 percent, are an invaluable resource institution in the Black community,b Dr. Myers explains, bnot only just as a source of employment, but, especially in my case, a political, social and cultural institutional Black powerhouse and threat to the white medical system.
The Black physician in private practice is now becoming extinct! Just like black hospitals, where there were close to 90 such hospitals in this country in the early 1900's, you can count on one hand how many black hospitals are still in existence today. Why are we now allowing this to happen to our black physicians? Why don't we own our own medical malpractice insurance companies?
As the first ordained and commissioned medical missionary to the Mississippi Delta, America's poorest region, in the history of the Black church in America, in 1990, by the Wisconsin Baptist Pastors Conference and Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, in Milwaukee, Wisc., our Christian Family Health Centers in Mississippi represent the Black church's most important health ministry outreach to the neediest of our people in America. Black church leaders should be very concerned that our health ministry may close over such foolishness as having my malpractice insurance not renewed when I have never had a medical malpractice judgment against me in over 16 years of practicing medicine in Mississippi as a Baptist medical missionary.
Where is the outrage from Black church leaders? Start closing down white-owned and controlled Baptist hospitals, Lutheran hospitals, Catholic hospitals, Methodist hospitals etc. over medical malpractice insurance company greed through the non-renewal of these church-based physiciansb malpractice insurance policies and watch what happens. Where is the compassion of Jesus toward the thousands of poor patients in the Mississippi Delta who will no longer have my services as a Christian medical missionary?
An alarming number of Black physicians work for the government, whether a local county-owned health clinic or hospital or a federally funded community health center, and are no longer in private practice! In such settings, Black physicians have no control over such institutions as they would their privately owned and operated health centers!
Black physicians face racism and other forms of intimidation and control in these white-controlled medical institutions. They are powerless to take charge over organizing the Black community as a political force to improve our worsening health disparities that are a direct result of the racism and health institutional castration of Black physicians. Why do you think our tremendous health care problems continue to spiral downward, more than any ethnic and cultural group in America?
It should be to no one's surprise, especially to politically astute Black leaders, that an all-white medical malpractice insurance company, the only one writing policies in Mississippi, which has the president of the American Medical Association (AMA) on their Board of Directors, Dr. J. Edward Hill, would attack a progressive and caring Black physician, Baptist minister and the very effective national leader of the bModern Juneteenth Movementb in America.
What is surprising is how we as Black people tolerate such garbage and do not demand accountability from the system and a public outcry over the tremendous loss of health and life that will be the result of the closing of several health centers in the poorest region of America, the Mississippi Delta, over insurance industry greed and btort reform.b
The racist malpractice insurance industry has gone on record calling our Black communities bjudicial hell holesb and developing political and legal strategies to limit predominately Black juries from issuing justice through monetary judgments.
It should be to no one's surprise that strong and community conscious Black physicians like myself are under attack. We need to call our Black political leaders in Congress to take notice and speak out. Black physicians need to speak out (if they are not afraid of losing their jobs, suburban mansions, expensive cars and bNegro statusb in white- controlled hospitals, clinics and other medical institutions to tell the truth).
Black community leaders need to speak out. I have already made up my mind to speak out and to alert the Black community to the extinction of the Black physician as an irreplaceable institution in the Black community.
We must turn this situation around for our people and community now!
To learn more and to support Dr. Myers, call him at (662) 247-1471 or (662) 247-3364, email: MyersFound@aol.com or visit Meyers Foundation and Juneteenth
The Jackson Advocate News Service contributed to this story.
Stop the Medical Malpractice Lynching of
Baptist Medical Missionary and
American Pain Institute Founder & President:
Rev. Ronald V. Myers, Sr., M.D.!
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