Bedside manner aside, Rothstein is known to the 8,208 people who work for her in the county's S687 million Bureau of Health Care as part taskmaster and part mastermind. In just eight years she has transformed one of the country's largest and most antiquated healthcare systems into a tightly run network of four hospitals and 28 outpatient clinics serving more than 1.5 million indigent people each year. Says Richard Phelan, the Cook County board president who hired Rothstein in 1991 to resuscitate the system's flagship hospital: "Ruth has done more to provide health care for the poor than anyone I can think of."
When Rothstein first took the helm, County Hospital, with its 590 beds, was plagued by what she calls "dysfunction" and had been stripped of its accreditation by a private voluntary oversight commission. Within a year it was reaccredited; within three it was touted as the inspiration for NBC's hit series ER. By then, Rothstein, whose portfolio had expanded to include the Bureau of Health Services, had embarked on a mission she describes as bringing "dignity and compassion to the delivery of health care." She streamlined pharmacy procedures and installed a cooling system. To maintain effective training of future doctors, she forged a relationship with nearby Rush Medical School. And to build trust with patients, she closed the ward where women in labor were taken to scream in a harrowing chorus.
Next, she pushed to decentralize the county's health care. While the main hospital once handled most of all outpatient visits, thousands of patients are now seen at new community clinics. But the biggest coup was yet to come. In April 1998, on Rothstein's 75th birthday, ground was broken for a new $551 million, eight-story, 464-bed Cook County Hospital, scheduled to open in 2002. For years, some local pols had fought new construction, arguing that the aging facility should be closed and patients sent elsewhere. By persistently working her extensive network of medical, business and political contacts, Rothstein helped to wear down the opposition. "It was unconscionable not to build a new hospital, but no one before Ruth was able to do it," says Dr. Robert Weinstein, director of the CORE Center, a $25 million outpatient AIDS clinic that Rothstein helped open. "She used her political skills, street smarts and charm."
That bespeaks a lifetime of experience. The oldest of four children, Rothstein grew up in the predominantly Jewish Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Her father, Hyman Merson, a Russian immigrant who did piecework in shoe factories, treated a park near the family's three-bedroom apartment as his bully pulpit to promote various social welfare issues. "When he couldn't win a battle," says Rothstein, "he would call on me to help."
Graduating from the Brooklyn Girls' Commercial High School in 1939, Rothstein took a receptionist job that paid $6 a week, plus free viola lessons. At 21, she struck out on her own for Cleveland, where she worked as an organizer for the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. Her first assignment was to write a leaflet aimed at organizing women on the Westinghouse Corp. assembly line. "I said to myself, 'How the hell do I write a leaflet?' " she says, laughing. But she knew what her theme would be: equal pay.
After seven years in Cleveland that included a failed five-year marriage and 30 days in jail for hitting a strikebreaker, she moved to Chicago, where she'd heard there was an opening for a union organizer. When the lead proved false, she knocked on the door of fellow activist Leo Turner and requested shelter. His wife, Irene, asked, "Do you know how to bathe a baby?" "Of course," said Rothstein, who never had. She spent the next six months babysitting.
In 1950 the Turners introduced her to David Rothstein, a 41-year-old labor lawyer. It was love at first sight, and after Ruth landed a union job, she proposed. "Don't be ridiculous," she remembers David scoffing. She refused to see him. Two weeks later he relented. They married shortly afterward and had two children, Martha, now 47, a healthcare social worker, and Jonathan, 44, a civil rights attorney. Both parents, says Jonathan, "felt that you had to conduct your life in a way that would try and make the world a better place." David died in 1983 of Parkinson's disease.
While raising her family in Chicago, Rothstein became a political fund-raiser, then took a job as a lab technician at Jackson Park Hospital, where she rose to become head of personnel. In 1966 she moved to a low-level job at Mount Sinai, a Jewish hospital in a neighborhood that had become predominantly African-American. Within four years she was functioning as the hospital's CEO—but wasn't given the full title until 1972, because she was a woman and lacked a formal education. By the time she was wooed to Cook County, she had transformed crumbling Mount Sinai into a viable health center. "Ruth is one of the most capable people I have ever encountered," says Al Ulmans, who was on the hospital's board. "She commands both respect and some degree of fear in people."
Still, she has her soft spots. Grandson Max, 11, easily persuades his bubbe (Yiddish for "grandma") to buy a constant supply of video and computer games. Rothstein also loves to shop—when she finds a style of Ferragamo shoes that fit her slender size 10½ feet, she buys three pairs—and prides herself on a stylish wardrobe. Pointing to a picture of herself with Princess Diana during a royal visit to County Hospital in 1996, she says with a laugh, "Don't you think my suit was nicer than hers?" Some would say that's chutzpah; others would say, That's Ruth.
Jill Smolowe
Giovanna Breu in Chicago
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- Giovanna Breu.
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