The Last
Safety Net
Part Four
from Sick in a Hospital Town
The board that oversees Phoebe decides not to release a report that finds the cost of care at the hospital is higher than its peers.
June 1, 2022
On Wednesday, Mrs. Parker’s sixth day sitting vigil, Dr. James Palazzolo introduced himself, explaining that he was now the critical care specialist on call. Mrs. Parker had seen Palazzolo around the hospital over the years. She’d been put off a bit by his formal bearing until a close friend who had been Palazzolo’s patient told her how much she liked him. Palazzolo, in fact, was warm, but he hadn’t come to bring Mrs. Parker good news. He wanted to know whether Dr. Parker had signed a living will that explained how he wanted her and his doctors to manage the end of his life, in the event that he was unable to tell them himself.
Mrs. Parker froze for a second and then asked Palazzolo what he meant. She hadn’t been preparing for the end of her husband’s life. She’d been preparing for a “Grey’s Anatomy” moment. He seemed so close. He’d already opened his eyes.
Palazzolo asked her if she had spoken with a neurologist.
Mrs. Parker shook her head. Should she have? she wondered to herself. How was she supposed to know that? Palazzolo said that her husband was being seen by a neurologist and that he’d arrange for her to meet with him. She didn’t even know a neurologist had been involved in her husband’s care. Palazzolo explained that he wanted her to get a specialist’s opinion of her husband’s condition, but his reading of the medical records suggested that Dr. Parker’s brain damage was extensive. He wasn’t getting progressively better, and it seemed unlikely that he would.
Mrs. Parker suddenly didn’t know whom to believe. The previous doctors had told her that they were going to give her husband’s brain time to rest and recover and then would wake him. No one had raised the possibility that he wouldn’t recover. “Anthony opened his eyes,” she reminded Palazzolo.
That was a reflex, a spasm, the doctor said. It wasn’t a sign of brain activity. There hadn’t been any meaningful sign of brain activity since the surgery, he told her.
Mrs. Parker stood in stunned silence. Why hadn’t anyone told her that? She didn’t want to think the worst of Phoebe, that the hospital had been deliberately keeping the truth from her, but she couldn’t help herself.
Palazzolo asked her whether she and her husband had ever discussed what they would want the other to do under these kinds of circumstances. He encouraged her to summon her children to discuss next steps, and he repeated that he would make sure to have a neurologist meet with her before the end of the day.
Andrea, the Parkers’ middle child, arrived at the hospital soon after. They were sitting in a waiting area outside of Dr. Parker’s room when Dr. William Garrett, the neurologist on call, appeared in a white lab coat and bow tie. He invited the Parkers to talk in his office. The space, little bigger than a closet, was cramped and cluttered. Garrett sat behind a desk and turned his computer monitor toward them, calling up different models of the brain, and proceeded to show images and charts that explained the various kinds of damage that could have been caused during the four to 14 minutes Dr. Parker’s heart had stopped beating.
Andrea, taking notes, wrote, “4-14,” and then looked up. “We thought it had only been a few minutes, five at the most,” she said. “Now you’re saying it could have been 14?”
The neurologist told her that the records he’d seen from the day of the procedure weren’t clear, so he couldn’t be sure, but it looked to him like it might have taken much longer than five minutes to restore her dad’s heartbeat. Then he turned back to his models, describing something about inconclusive clinical trials, which made it hard to assess certain kinds of damage to the brain and the chances for recovery.
Mrs. Parker’s face went blank again. She was unable to absorb most of what Garrett was saying. What did those images on his computer have to do with Anthony? she thought to herself. Why is this man speaking to me like I’m one of his med students?
Andrea was also losing patience. She was scribbling the doctor’s words — “extensive posturing in all extremities,” “flexor response at day six,” “reminiscent of diffuse expression” — but she had no idea what they meant. When he told her that there was no single data point that he could use to provide a conclusive prognosis, she stopped him. “I know neurology isn’t an exact science,” she said, “but I don’t want to talk about models.”
Pointing at herself and then at her mother, she went on, “I want to talk about this case — about my dad, her husband.”
The doctor said he wished he knew more about the extent and severity of the brain damage, but he hadn’t been able to perform a scan because Phoebe didn’t have a mobile MRI machine and her dad was too unstable to be moved.
Based on the little he knew, Andrea asked, what would he do if this was his loved one?
Garrett turned away from his computer and toward Mrs. Parker. He told her that he was married to a sweet, beautiful woman whom he loved dearly, but that he didn’t think it would be useful to speculate on what he’d do in Mrs. Parker’s shoes. He told her that his clinical assessment of her husband’s condition was the same as Palazzolo’s. It wasn’t getting progressively better. As for what she should do, he said perhaps she wouldn’t have to do anything. Sometimes, he told her, God makes the decision for us.
The room went silent. Mrs. Parker could feel her daughter about to explode. Why was this doctor talking in circles? Was he hiding something? Was Phoebe hiding something? Suddenly its embrace seemed more like a trap.
Chapter 7
“I Can Assure You Those Days Are Over”
Scott Steiner, who succeeded Joel Wernick as the CEO at Phoebe, was happy to cooperate with my reporting when I was focused on the hospital’s response to COVID-19. But he was less enthusiastic when I told him that my focus had shifted to the health system’s relationship with Albany. He explained why when I met with him in his office, and he told me about the first time he sat with Wernick.
It was 2018, and the office looked different back then. Wernick, he said, kept it like a bunker — dimly lit with a dark carpet, hunter-green furniture and thick velvet drapes that were drawn shut. Steiner had been told that Wernick barely left the office during work hours anymore and that he never opened the drapes. According to Steiner, when he asked Wernick why not, the CEO looked at him with a “little wily smile” and said, “For fear of being shot.”
Leading Phoebe during COVID-19 hadn’t been easy, Steiner said, but distancing himself from his predecessor was even more challenging. In his first year, he’d held 570 meetings with community groups, churches and medical practices, many of them taken up with decades-old grievances — what Steiner described as the “ghosts that will outlast me.”
Responses From Phoebe
Ginger Thompson emailed a detailed set of questions to former Phoebe Putney Health System CEO Joel Wernick, left multiple voicemail messages and sent him three letters by FedEx but received no response. She sent a letter with questions to Phoebe’s former attorney, Robert Baudino, and received no response. She also sent letters with questions to those involved in Dr. Anthony Parker’s care — Dr. José Ernesto Betancourt, Dr. Jyotir Mehta, Dr. Dianna Grant, Dr. James Palazzolo, Dr. William Garrett, Alan-Wayne Howard, Dr. Michael Coleman and Dr. Marla Morgan — and received no response.
In response to questions, a Phoebe spokesperson accused ProPublica of intentionally excluding positive patient stories. “Most patients have positive experiences at Phoebe,” he said. “Ignoring that fact is wrong.”
Steiner, who is 57, grew up in St. Louis. His mother was an intensive care unit nurse, his father an executive at a printing company. He received his MBA from nearby Webster University. Before joining Phoebe he had been the CEO for a group of Detroit hospitals, owned by Tenet Healthcare, the second-largest for-profit health system in the country. It was a miserable experience, he told me. He oversaw five layoffs in his first two and a half years. Then he had to manage the fallout from a series of newspaper stories that revealed how some of the hospitals had nearly lost their licenses after doctors filed complaints about dirty and broken surgical instruments.
Three prominent cardiologists claimed that the health system fired them for making those complaints public, and two filed a wrongful termination suit against Tenet and Steiner. The cardiologists eventually won a $10.6 million award. (Officials at Tenet did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Steiner didn’t want to talk about his role in the matter when we met, except to say that the turmoil made him open to calls from a headhunter who told him about the opportunity at Phoebe.
“I didn’t think places like this existed anymore,” he told me. Compared to the “shit show” in Detroit, he said, Phoebe Factoids, the anonymous fax campaign against the hospital that consumed Albany in the early 2000s, seemed like “a lot of external nonsense.” Phoebe’s future direction would ultimately rest with him, not distant corporate overlords. All he had to do was get people in Albany to trust him, to put the past behind them. “What I’ve tried to say to people is, it’s a new chapter.” he told me. My reporting, he said, threatened to stir up old tensions.
He knew such tensions were already stirring well before I came along. He’d heard them firsthand during his numerous meetings with the community. Mayor Kermit “Bo” Dorough, who’d been a critic of the hospital since the Factoid days, was threatening to commission a study of health care costs. And in early 2020, nearly a year after Steiner’s arrival and weeks before COVID-19 hit the city, The Albany Southwest Georgian, a weekly Black newspaper, published the official portraits of Phoebe’s executive team across its front page. Most were people Steiner had inherited. None was Black.
The racial composition of Albany’s political hierarchy had shifted in the previous 20 years. The city’s manager and police chief were both Black, and so was the county district attorney and chief judge of the county court. Until Dorough’s election as mayor in 2019, African Americans had held the office for four straight terms. The majority of the members of the hospital authority was Black. Among them was a retired civil rights lawyer named Nyota Tucker, who was alarmed by the Southwest Georgian’s front page. Why were there no Blacks on the health system’s executive team, she asked Steiner during one authority meeting.
Bespectacled and silver-haired, Tucker, 76, carries herself with quiet reserve. As a teenager, she was one of six students — all girls — to integrate her hometown’s high school. She went on to become the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Georgia School of Law. Afterward, she moved to Albany to work for Georgia Legal Aid, where judges in her first cases demanded she provide proof that she was a member of the bar. She left Albany for a few years to join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco and then returned, eventually becoming a member of the faculty at the historically Black Albany State University and later its chief counsel.
She didn’t know much about the health care system or how it worked when she agreed to serve on the hospital authority in 2017. She saw volunteering as a way to stay active after she retired and to serve the community. “The authority was not known to cross Phoebe,” Tucker told me. Quickly, she established herself, according to one board member, as the “contrarian in the room” — the person who said what “nobody else wanted to say.”
In late 2020, Steiner added Dr. Dianna Grant, a Black physician, to his executive team. The next year, the hospital authority elected its first African American chair, a businessman named Glenn Singfield. When I interviewed Singfield, he made clear he was also aware of the authority’s history as a rubber stamp. He told me he wanted to break from the days when the authority consisted of people who’d been “handpicked” by Phoebe to “do the hospital’s bidding.” He said, “I can assure you those days are over.”
“Somebody said, ‘Do you hire Black people?’”
Scott Steiner, CEO of Phoebe Putney Health System, in 2021
There were reasons to be skeptical. The authority relied on Phoebe for its funding as well as for its administrator and lawyer. The hospital managed the authority’s website and routinely hosted its meetings in the Phoebe board room. And five out of its nine members were doctors or had other financial ties to Phoebe, including a former mayor who had received numerous campaign contributions from Phoebe executives and Singfield, who owned a construction company that had contracts with the health system.
Still, Tucker wanted to believe Singfield and wanted to believe that Steiner would lead Phoebe in a new direction. But she soon found herself at odds with him. As the pandemic loosened its grip on Albany, she resurfaced a proposal she had made the year before to have the authority hire a consultant to assess whether the hospital was meeting its lease obligations to provide safe and affordable care to the community.
The previous review had been done in 2012, before the advent of Obamacare and Georgia’s decision not to expand Medicaid. The assessment would allow the authority to get a better sense of those policies’ effects. Besides, she was new to the authority, and Steiner was new to the health system, and it seemed like a good way to get a baseline understanding of where things at the hospital stood so they could see where things could be improved.
Steiner told the authority he was not opposed to a review but wondered whether hiring an outside consultant was a good use of precious resources. He said that Phoebe would provide any information the authority requested to assess how well the health system was managing the hospital.
Tucker argued that hiring an outside firm was the only way to get an assessment that was “free of any hidden agendas,” even though the money for the review would ultimately come from Phoebe. Since several members of the authority, including herself, had little to no experience in health care, they might not know what questions to ask, she said.
The authority voted in favor of hiring outside consultants. They presented their findings at a meeting in May 2021. Marvin Laster, president of the city’s Boys and Girls Club and a member of the hospital’s board of directors, attended. Tucker was surprised. Laster hadn’t ever come to an authority meeting that Tucker could remember, but she knew him — she was on the club’s board — and she was happy to have a friend in the room.
The analysis read like an exercise in damning with faint praise. Phoebe, the consultants wrote, was “committed to providing quality care” and was “delivering comparable or better quality than its peers in many areas.” However, when they zeroed in on the seven metrics that make up the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ star rating system, they found that Phoebe “currently ranks below the national average in five of the areas, including mortality, readmission, patient experience, effectiveness of care and timeliness of care.”
While Phoebe had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in building, buying and equipping new facilities, the consultants pointed out, its investments in the maintenance and modernization of the old buildings — which the consultants emphasized were among the health system’s core obligations to the county — were “consistently on the lower end” of its peers.
The hospital’s financial margins were comparable if not better than its peers, the report concluded, but it relied more heavily on long-term debt to fund its operations — an indication that Phoebe still hadn’t fully absorbed the cost of the Palmyra merger 10 years earlier.
As for the percentage of gross revenues that Phoebe spent to help the poor, the report found it had a “lower charity/indigent care percentage than its local, regional and national peers, in all years except 2015.” And finally, the report found that Phoebe’s cost of services “are, on average, higher than local, regional and national peers.” In short, the issues that had bedeviled the hospital’s relations with its community — the quality of care, cost of care and its outreach to the poor — hadn’t changed.
When the consultants concluded their presentation, the first questions to arise were less about the findings and more about what to do with them, according to two authority members attending the meeting.
Singfield was emphatic, Tucker said. He declared the report was “not for public consumption.” (Singfield did not respond to questions about the meeting.) Another member of the authority told me that everyone saw the finding regarding cost of care as “the big elephant in the room.” The member said, “There wasn’t any way to sugarcoat it.”
Steiner did not offer an opinion, but Laster weighed in. It was understood that he was speaking on Phoebe’s behalf, according to two members of the authority. Laster said that even though most of the assessment was upbeat, the information about the high costs of care could hurt the hospital’s image. He compared the potential effect to “rat poison.” Ninety percent of it’s not toxic, Tucker and the other member recalled him saying, but it’s the 10% that’ll kill you. (Laster later denied that he was proposing keeping the report secret.)
The consultants reminded the authority that because it was subject to open records laws, the report was going to get out. However if the authority released it, members would have better control of how it was perceived: It would demonstrate the body’s independence and its fidelity to its oversight responsibilities.
Tucker spoke vigorously in support of this view and suggested that if the authority was uncomfortable with announcing the report, it should at least post the findings on its website. That had been the practice until 2012, when, at Wernick’s urging, the authority voted not to release that year’s report. She said the authority should not condone that kind of secrecy anymore.
An authority member, who did not want to be named, told me the rest of the board was not convinced: “Even if the cost of care is too much, there was agreement in the room that undermining Phoebe, damaging Phoebe publicly, criticizing Phoebe too harshly in public is bad for the community in that Phoebe is the biggest employer and the only place you can go if you’re getting sick.”
Singfield suggested tabling the discussion until the next meeting, saying he was committed to releasing the report but wanted to give the authority time to work on how to do so. Four years later, the authority has still not made the report public.
June 1-2, 2022
Palazzolo returned to meet with Mrs. Parker, Andrea and her sister, Kim. He asked again whether Dr. Parker had signed a living will. Andrea said that he had, but there was no need for one. Her mother knew her father’s wishes. She would make any and all calls on her father’s care, and the children would support her 100%. What they needed from Phoebe was a clear assessment of their father’s condition. She asked whether he was brain dead.
Palazzolo said that he wasn’t and that, in fact, Dr. Parker was largely breathing on his own. His cognitive function, though, had been damaged beyond repair and would likely make it impossible for him to ever be the person he was.
Kim asked him to say more. Palazzolo stammered, searching for the right words. That man in there, he said, is not …
“… our dad,” Kim said, finishing his sentence.
Palazzolo nodded.
Kim kept going. “Because our dad left the day of the procedure.”
Palazzolo’s eyes lowered.
Mrs. Parker wanted another opinion. How could Phoebe have gone from telling her one minute that there was a chance to save her husband to saying that he’d been doomed from the time his heart stopped beating a week ago? She tried to come up with the name of a doctor she trusted to put her family’s interests ahead of Phoebe’s. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t have ties to the hospital. She immediately thought of her own neurologist, Marla Morgan. On staff at Phoebe, she’d become close to Mrs. Parker.
Morgan came from another of Albany’s prominent Black families. Her late father had served as president of Albany State University for 16 years. She arrived at Phoebe late Thursday afternoon and spent about 20 minutes in Dr. Parker’s room. Afterward, she asked Mrs. Parker whether he’d ever responded to the sound of her voice, to her pleas to open his eyes or squeeze her hand? Mrs. Parker shook her head.
Morgan said she didn’t see any sign of cognitive brain function. There was only the slimmest chance there ever would be. She used the same language Mrs. Parker had heard from Palazzolo. Her husband wasn’t getting progressively better.
That was enough for Mrs. Parker. Anthony would never want to live in a vegetative state. She instructed the medical staff to withdraw nutritional and respiratory support. In the previous days, Phoebe executives had stopped coming by Dr. Parker’s room. She wondered whether their absence was a gesture of respect or avoidance. Ever since her meeting with Garrett, the kids were increasingly unable to keep up a polite front and were fine not to see them. Kim and Andrea did not want to watch their father die. They said their goodbyes and asked their mother to call them when it was over. Richard offered to stay.
Mrs. Parker felt that she and her family were on their own — and that they always had been. She couldn’t make sense of how this had happened, of how Phoebe had allowed this to happen. She wanted so badly to scream at someone and demand an explanation, but there was no one around.
She needed to write a text to her siblings, Dr. Parker’s staff and several of their close friends, but how was she going to explain what had occurred, much less what was ahead for her husband? The cruel truth, she thought to herself, was that he was doped up and dying — she knew she couldn’t say that, though. She pulled out her phone, summoned what felt like her last shred of sanity and composed a message, which said only that he had begun “transitioning” and thanked them for their prayers.
Chapter 8
“My Mom Was a Phoebe Person”
Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the home of the 1961 civil rights protests, remains one of the most influential Black congregations in the city. Its pastor, Daniel Simmons, told me that in 2007 his members helped fund the opening of a free clinic, called Samaritan, across the street from Phoebe, for people without health insurance. The country was in the throes of the Great Recession. “People were dying in our backyard,” he said. “It wasn’t because they didn’t want to go to the doctor. It was because they couldn’t afford it.”
Phoebe donated one of its properties — a single-story brick building across the street — to the clinic and agreed to provide lab work for patients who qualified for state indigent funds. When I sat down with Simmons 13 years later, the need for the clinic wasn’t all that different from when it had opened. Some 16% of Albany residents were uninsured, almost double the national average, in part because the governor and the legislature had decided not to expand Medicaid. Albany, though, had Phoebe, a hospital whose mission was to care for people no matter their race or ability to pay. So I asked Simmons why a safety-net hospital needed a safety net.
Simmons arranged for me to meet Nedra Fortson, the nurse practitioner who runs the clinic. The day I met Fortson, she wasn’t seeing patients but was waiting for a repairman to come patch two holes in the building’s leaky roof. Phoebe hadn’t done much to maintain the property, she told me. (A Phoebe spokesperson said that over the years the hospital had “invested significantly in maintenance and repairs” to the building.)
As I began to ask the same question I had asked Simmons — why would people seek care at the clinic when Phoebe’s emergency room was right across the street — there was a knock at the door. In came a tall, muscular man wearing carpenter’s jeans, a face mask with Phoebe’s logo and a T-shirt with the words, “I am Phoebe.” His jaw was swollen from an infected tooth, and he was wondering whether Fortson could help him find someone to take it out.
The man told me he was 36 and worked on contract as a groundskeeper at the hospital. I recalled that Wernick had gotten his start as a hospital groundskeeper. I also thought that this man’s story was such a perfect illustration of the clinic’s importance that if his jaw hadn’t been oozing with pus, I might have thought I was being set up.
I asked him whether he’d sought help from Phoebe. He explained that he’d gone to the emergency room a few days earlier, and after a 10-hour wait and a 10-minute examination by a nurse, he walked out with two slips of paper: one with a prescription for antibiotics, the other with a list of dentists. I asked what happened to the slips of paper. He rolled his eyes and said, “I threw ’em away.”
On his $9-an-hour salary, he said, he couldn’t afford health insurance, and without insurance, he couldn’t afford antibiotics or a dentist. He had tried home remedies — mostly gargling with saltwater — but the pain in his mouth got worse. “It feels like I got hit with a fastball,” he said. The groundskeeper, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to put his job at risk, still forced himself to go to work because he needed the money. That turned out to be a good thing, he said, because one of his colleagues spotted Fortson driving into the clinic parking lot and sent him over to see whether Samaritan could refer him to a dentist who could treat him for free.
Then it was Fortson who rolled her eyes, not about the request of finding a dentist, which she managed to do that afternoon, but about someone doing work for Phoebe and coming to her for medical care. The groundskeeper wasn’t an anomaly, she told me. Nodding in the direction of the hospital, she said: “They all know us over there. Their cafeteria workers, their janitors, their clerks, their nursing assistants and so on.”
“We’ve become kind of a … go-to place for those persons that have no health insurance.”
Nedra Fortson, executive director of the Samaritan Clinic
With more than 5,500 workers, Phoebe Putney Health System is the largest employer in southwest Georgia. Its growth tracks with what’s happening across the country as the health care sector expands and manufacturing declines. But national studies have shown that hospital jobs are not like the manufacturing jobs they’ve replaced. The latter generally pay salaries that help lift unskilled workers into the middle class. Most hospital jobs don’t, which has an effect on both the workers and their ability to stimulate the local economy.
One 2017 study of workers in 11 industrial states found that for every higher-paying job held by doctors, six health care employees — including phlebotomists, orderlies, cooks — make less than $15 an hour. In Albany, where 78% of residents do not have college degrees, they were making on average less than $10.
Jack Nicholas Hilton, a former Cooper Tire worker, told me that at the time he’d gotten laid off, he was making $24 an hour. He said he was lucky enough to have a wife who was working as a nurse at Phoebe and could support him while he went back to school for a nursing degree. He made $21 an hour when he started at Phoebe in 2010. In addition, health benefits for him and his family of four came with a $5,000 deductible. If he had a kidney stone, which he did from time to time, that was $2,500 out of his pocket. “People think that if you work in health care you get good benefits,” he said. “Mine were terrible.” Hilton left Phoebe after three years and no longer works as a nurse.
Numerous other nurses at Phoebe shared similar stories. One former senior nursing manager told me she paid $300 every two weeks to cover herself, her husband and two children, including one in college, who had to drive home three hours for routine exams because Phoebe’s health plans did not cover those services elsewhere. The nurse now works for a hospital in California and pays $80 a month for the same coverage, and her daughter can receive care in the town where she goes to school.
An ICU nursing supervisor, who suffers serious allergies, told me he got his EpiPens from a school nurse, who would give him the extras she had every month. One day he and his wife went to see a Phoebe doctor to discuss a vasectomy and were told he’d have a $900 copay up front, which was not reimbursable. He said that he joked about it with his wife, saying, “$900 will buy us a lot of condoms.”
A Phoebe spokesperson said the health system offered high-deductible health insurance plans “for those who wish to minimize premiums, as well as offering a co-pay plan for those who prefer not to have a high-deductible plan.” This year, he added, Phoebe is paying 87% of the cost of health insurance premiums for employees.
Like hospitals across the country, Phoebe has been overwhelmed by nursing and physician shortages. According to the hospital’s financial records, between 2014 to 2022, its spending on contract staff exploded from $2.5 million to $150.2 million. Administrators told me that about $100 million of that went to pay for traveling nurses. Although they don’t receive health benefits, traveling nurses fetch salaries that are at least twice as high as those paid to the permanent nursing staff. This transient staff is not only a drain on Phoebe’s resources but typically doesn’t invest in the community by buying homes or sending their children to local schools.
It’s part of a vicious cycle that incentivizes permanent nurses to travel, further crippling Albany’s economy. The people who remain in town, for the most part, are low-skilled, low-paid employees, like the certified nursing assistant who worked part-time as a DoorDash delivery driver; the oncology scheduler whose colonoscopy bill had been sent to a collection agency; and Louise Williams, 51-year-old single mother and grandmother, known by her nickname, “Weezie.” She worked 22 years at Phoebe in what is called the environmental services — cleaning and disinfecting patient rooms. During the first year of the pandemic, she was the only person on Phoebe’s staff to die of COVID-19.
In her honor, the hospital renovated the environmental services staff break room, installing recliners, a refrigerator stocked with healthy snacks and a flat-screen TV. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony that was attended by Steiner and other hospital executives, the room was christened Weezie’s Place. The hospital invited her family, including her daughter, Shabreka Dent, who thanked Phoebe for remembering unsung heroes like her mother. “My mom was a Phoebe person,” she said. “She loved working here.”
Remembering
Louise “Weezie” Williams
1968-2020
A few months before the dedication, I had gone to see Williams’ family because two nurses at the hospital had told me they were taking up a collection to help pay her funeral costs. Dent said the same thing to me that she would say at Phoebe: Her mother loved working at the hospital.
“Nothing we ever said would get her to leave that place,” Dent told me.
Did you try to get her to leave? I asked.
“I used to tell her all the time she should quit that job,” she said.
Why? I asked.
“Because she was always struggling.”
Dent said that when her mother first started at Phoebe more than 20 years ago, she worked part time, thinking she’d eventually find a different job with better hours and better pay. But Williams’ prospects were limited, because she hadn’t finished high school, factories were starting to lay people off and the only employer whose future looked bright was the hospital. Two decades later, Williams was earning less than $10 an hour, often taking home less than $300 a week.
When Williams died, she was late on her rent, which Dent said happened frequently. Her mother’s day-to-day existence, she said, was a gantlet of overdue bills and payday loans, which became even more crushing in 2014, after Dent’s older sister died of cervical cancer and Williams took custody of her two teenage grandsons.
“She would call me, and say, ‘Hey, I’m fine, but if you could get the boys something to eat.’ Or there were several times I paid the light bill for her, or she’d come around, and I’d pay her cellphone bill, or when time for school came around, I’d get clothes for all the kids.”
Dent showed me where she’d gotten her mother’s name tattooed on her right forearm. “She used to say she liked taking care of people,” she said. “I told her, ‘That’s all good, but you got to take care of you, too.’”
Up Next: Part Five
Too Big to Fight
Phoebe gets its way and sidelines its critics. Mrs. Parker learns what happened to her husband.
Keep Reading
How We Reported This Story
Ginger Thompson interviewed more than 150 current and former residents of Albany, Georgia, as well as more than 75 current and former staff members of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and Phoebe Putney Health System. She consulted with dozens of public health professionals, medical and legal experts, health care economists and strategists, and historians. Two of those interviewed, Demetrius Young and Nathaniel Smith, have since died.
To reconstruct Sandra Parker’s experiences before, during and after the surgery of her husband, Anthony Parker, Thompson drew from extensive interviews with her and her children as well as from texts, emails, medical records and depositions.
She and Doris Burke reviewed the minutes of the hospital’s board as well as those of the Hospital Authority of Albany-Dougherty County. They examined text messages and emails; medical records; nonprofit IRS filings; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data; census records; Georgia public and community health data; Georgia death records; tax assessor data; federal and state court filings; federal, state and local campaign contribution filings; municipal bond offering documents; and bond rating agency reports.
Story Credits
Creative direction, design and development by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Videos by Katie Campbell and Almudena Toral. Audio produced by Katherine Wells and Theater of War Productions.
Additional Credits
Additional video editing by Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica. Hospital research by Russell Autry. Parker family photos courtesy of Sandra Parker. Display typeface by Vocal Type.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.