RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the Mount Sinai Medical School, Class of 2020, there is a brilliant and beautiful and charming student who calls me “grams.” rsk

New York’s 45-bed Jews’ Hospital opened for patients on this date in 1855. It would change its name to the Mount Sinai Hospital after the Civil War. Founded by Sampson Simson, a philanthropist, on land that he owned on 28th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, the hospital found its resources especially taxed by the war-wounded of the Union Army and by the draft riots of 1863, which took the lives of scores of black New Yorkers. Mount Sinai began appointing women to professional positions in 1872, and founded a school of nursing in 1881, which graduated 4,700 nurses (only one man among them) in its ninety years of existence. Mount Sinai was also the first hospital to use kidney dialysis in the U.S., to combine chemotherapy with radiation to combat breast cancer, to use a cardiac stress test, and to perform a fetal blood transfusion, among many other medical firsts. During the Holocaust, Mount Sinai gave jobs to many doctors fleeing Nazi Germany as early as 1933 and became a new home for a large number of émigrés. In 2005, Mount Sinai established one of the leading stem-cell research centers in the U.S. In 2013 Dr. David L. Reich became the first openly gay physician to serve as president of the hospital.

“During the first few years that it functioned, most patients were immigrants to the U.S. As the Jews’ Hospital was a charitable enterprise, its directors depended on donations from Jewish friends and members, as well as payments from the government, to provide enough to subsidize care. . . . [In 2013, the] hospital boasted 2,510 physicians, 1,097 residents and fellows, 2,278 nurses, 58,332 inpatient discharges, 644,527 outpatient and 102,639 emergency room visits. . .” –Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Posthttp://jewishcurrents.org/the-jews-hospital/

He will be running against Republican Governor Rick Snyder. A quote from his issues page: ”

As governor, I will support our immigrant communities and fight for a pathway to citizenship. It’s time for Michigan to be a leader and consider what it can do to be a ‘Sanctuary State’.

Abdul El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan. His family reflects the diversity of our state, including immigrants who left Egypt in pursuit of greater opportunity in America, and farmers, teachers, and small-business owners who have lived in Gratiot County, Michigan for generations. Abdul is a product of Michigan public schools. He captained his high-school football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams, and went on to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan. He graduated in 2007, where he was honored to deliver the student commencement speech alongside President Bill Clinton.

Abdul went on to become a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate from Oxford University and a medical degree from Columbia University. As a public health professor, Abdul became an internationally recognized expert in health policy and health inequalities.

At 30, Abdul became the youngest health official of a major American city when he was brought home by Mayor Mike Duggan to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department after it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy. As Health Director, he was responsible for the health and safety of over 670,000 Detroiters, working tirelessly to ensure government accountability and transparency, promote health, and reduce cross-generational poverty.

After witnessing the systematic failures of government only a few miles away in Flint, Abdul worked hard to ensure that children attending Detroit schools and daycares were drinking lead-free water. He has also served expectant mothers and women by creating programs aimed at reducing infant mortality and unplanned pregnancy. He built a program to give schoolchildren across the city glasses if they needed them. Abdul also stood up for children with asthma by taking on corporations that wanted to pump more harmful pollutants into our air, working with them to reduce emissions and invest in parks.

Though the work continues, under Abdul’s leadership, the Detroit Health Department has become a state and national leader in public health innovation and environmental justice, in one of the fastest municipal public health turnarounds in American history.

Abdul is called to public service by a core belief in people. He believes that all people can thrive when we value each other and our communities, we seek to protect and defend our vulnerable, and when we create the kinds of opportunities that empower people to dream for a better future.

Abdul lives in Detroit with his wife, Sarah, a mental health doctor. He loves water sports, working out, good biographies, coffee, and Michigan sports.

An evening stranded on an O’Hare airport runway is enough to make anyone mad, and on Monday Donald Trump responded with a plan for improving American air travel. The President endorsed spinning off air-traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration, a decades-old idea that would improve passenger experience and safety.

Mr. Trump announced principles for converting air-traffic control into a nonprofit. The new entity would be governed by a board of directors, including representatives for airlines, unions, airports and others. Instead of taxes, the outfit would be funded by user fees, which is how Canada has financed air-traffic services since 1996. The outline makes small tweaks to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster’s proposal that stalled last year.

The proposal is being dismissed as one of Mr. Trump’s eccentric obsessions, though Al Gore supported a version in the 1990s. President Trump is right that while “every passenger has GPS technology in their pockets, our air-traffic control system still runs on radar,” circa 1945. The FAA’s modernization program known as NextGen is expected to crash through its 2025 deadline by as much as a decade.
One illustration is electronic flight strips. U.S. towers use pieces of paper to monitor a flight’s progress, even as FAA has promised to transition to digital slips, among other technology updates. How’s that going? The product will be rolled out somewhere between 2020 and 2028—to only 89 of the busiest towers, as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole has detailed. Canada’s air-traffic system NavCanada deployed electronic strips a dozen years ago.

In May the Transportation Department Inspector General offered some reasons why the FAA so routinely fails to deliver new technology: “overambitious plans, unreliable cost and schedule estimates, unstable requirements, software development problems, poorly defined benefits, and ineffective contract and program management.” Is that all?

FAA regulates itself, so a separation would end this conflict-of-interest and allow the agency to focus on safety and certification. This reform is endorsed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, and only the most cynical on the left could claim a spinoff threatens passenger safety. Democrats will say Mr. Trump is auctioning off air traffic to big business, but the principles are explicit that the entity must be a nonprofit. The outline gives airlines only two seats on the 13-member board.