Could more comprehensive primary care have kept people alive during the 1995 Chicago heat wave?
More than 600 people died in 1995’s infamous five-day heat wave, when temperatures topped out at 106 with a heat index (the warm-weather counterpart of wind chill) of 125. As soon as the mercury fell back to normal, doctors in Chicago started trying to figure out how they could have helped prevent so many deaths. Terry Vanden Hoek, who had just started as an attending physician in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago, was one of those doctors. . “There were a lot of questions about what we could have done better,” he says. “The thing about heat waves is that they’re pretty predictable. We knew this heat wave was coming. Yet we really didn’t prepare for it as well as we could have.” Neither did many of the city’s elderly poor, who were afraid to go outside because of crime. They found themselves trapped in their own apartments and many died for lack of air conditioning. Several provisions in the health-care-reform bills might have saved those people, says Vanden Hoek. The Sen
