Medical Care Charity

As the doctors, nurses and social workers who hold together this city's frayed safety net have done many times since Hurricane Katrina, Johann Bultman knew he would have to get resourceful when a musician approached him last year in desperate need of surgery for her spine.

The singer was one of the unlucky thousands living without health insurance in a city without a safety-net hospital. Although indigent patients could rely on Charity Hospital before Hurricane Katrina, since the storm they often have depended on the goodwill and ingenuity of providers such as Bultman, who runs a clinic where local musicians pay what they can afford for basic medical care.

Bultman delivered for the musician. The woman had lined up a doctor who would perform the surgery if Bultman could find a private hospital willing to donate an operating room. After "much searching back and forth," he persuaded Tenet Healthcare to admit the patient at Kenner Regional Medical Center for no charge.