“Sick in a Hospital Town” is a video series about healthcare, race, money and power. It is set in Albany, Georgia, a majority African American city of 67,000 that rose to national attention in early 2020 as one of the world’s worst COVID-19 hot spots. COVID-19 was just the latest in a long list of health crises to hit the city. Since the 1990s, its residents had suffered some of Georgia’s and the nation’s worst health disparities — high rates of diabetes, high death rates from heart and kidney disease, low life expectancy rates. They had become poorer and sicker at the same time that Phoebe Putney Memorial, Albany’s main hospital, had aggressively expanded and became a monopoly, leading to some of the most expensive health insurance rates in the country. Why are people in Albany — and, for that matter, the city of Albany itself — so sick when its most powerful institution is a hospital?
With health care such a large portion of the American economy, there are now numerous cities like Albany. They are hospital towns, not dissimilar to towns in Kentucky or West Virginia where, for much of the 20th century, a coal company dominated almost every aspect of life.
This video series dives into different spaces in this town where you see the inequalities first hand. The first video is a creative fast-paced trailer for the series. The second video is an embed at a small, free clinic serving people without health insurance in Albany right across the main hospital. The third video follows a family who lost several relatives during the covid-19 pandemic and later grappled the longstanding issues of distrust of the healthcare system and of the local hospital, while trying to stay healthy.
With unparalleled, hard-to-earn access during the course of five years in the town and at the hospital, this video series deploys intimate cinematography and nuanced editing. These videos got published in diverse platforms in different formats, garnering a captive audience.
Most Americans intuitively understand that our health care system is broken; that it costs too much and delivers too little. We’ve all had or know someone who had a hard time getting the care they need. Since these stories were published, we’ve heard from people across the country who told us that they’ve felt seen or the coverage has helped them better understand their own predicament.
A viewer said: “Albany and all of the US deserve better than this from healthcare professionals and systems”, “Thank you for making this documentary and shedding more light on a terribly unfair healthcare system. I hope the man with the tumor and the lady with the foot problems eventually got them taken care of.”
“Sick in a Hospital Town” is at once epic and intimate, raw and elegant, it takes on two of the most powerful forces shaping American society — race and health care — and how they affect all of us in the most profound and unsettling ways.
