Beilenson

The City Council should waste no time confirming Dr. Peter L. Beilenson as the new health commissioner. The sooner the 32-year-old physician can take full responsibility for the running of the municipal health department the better.Dr. Beilenson comes with outstanding credentials. First as the chief resident of the preventive medicine program at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and then as director of the city's school health services, he has demonstrated a deeply felt concern for exactly the kinds of health issues that are increasingly characteristic of Baltimore's problems.

Peter Beilenson — doctor and public health visionary, Baltimore health commissioner, Howard County health officer, quick-study scholar and decoder of federal regulations — remains one of our most interesting men. A person whose leadership has certainly improved the lives of thousands of Marylanders over the last 20 years, from Baltimore heroin addicts to young families in Columbia, Beilenson is now trying to establish a nonprofit health insurance...

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke has made a good -- an uncharacteristically bold -- choice in nominating Dr. Peter L. Beilenson as the city's health commissioner.The chief strength of Dr. Beilenson, 32, is his youthful eagerness to come to the grips with the many serious public health problems plaguing Baltimore, a city increasingly defined by deprivation and poverty. First as chief resident of the preventive medicine program at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and then as director of the city's school health services, the physician has shown a commitment to dealing with scourges ranging from AIDS to lead poisoning.

On the day the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the central provisions of the federal health care overhaul he has championed as Maryland's most visible public health official, Dr. Peter Beilenson revealed, publicly and for the first time, that he has Parkinson's disease. He brought it up during my WYPR radio show Thursday afternoon, and he mentioned it to television reporters who chased him for a sound bite after the court's historic ruling. "I was diagnosed five years ago," said Beilenson, 52, the chief health officer of Howard County and former health commissioner of Baltimore.

Stung by criticism from a County Council member that Howard County's new health access plan has enrolled too few residents, officials are refocusing their efforts to find more people who qualify. Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the county health officer, said yesterday that to ensure continued political support for the Healthy Howard Plan, he is seeking residents who do not have health insurance and who do not qualify for any existing program. The program seeks to provide access to health care to each of the estimated 20,000 limited-income residents who have no insurance.

In a city where mayoral cabinet members are rarely recognized outside of City Hall, Baltimore Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson finds himself quoted on the front pages of national newspapers, pursued by television networks.Not bad for a guy who's been in office just over a month.Dr. Beilenson didn't think it was big news last week when The Sun reported that he's organized a consortium of Baltimore doctors, hospitals and foundations to promote Norplant, the five-year contraceptive, among teen-agers.

Peter Beilenson appears to believe that the best defense is a good offense. Appearing before the Howard County Council last week, the health officer called Healthy Howard's initial enrollment period "a tremendous success" and vigorously defended the Ulman administration's signature program before the council's lone critic, Fulton Republican Greg Fox, could say anything. The program seeks to extend access to health services to uninsured county residents. Liddy Garcia-Bunuel, director of Healthy Howard Inc., the nonprofit created to run the program, accompanied Beilenson, along with two other program staffers.

OVER AN early-morning bowl of oatmeal, the breakfast of pacifists, Dr. Peter L. Beilenson confesses he had only one fistfight over the course of his entire youth. He was a fifth-grader. A classmate who had been annoying Beilenson put a couple of words together in unhealthy conjunction. Beilenson, the future health commissioner of Baltimore, threw a hard right hand, never in this lifetime to be repeated. "I thought he was calling my mother a name," Beilenson says, more than three decades after the fact.

The ubiquitous health commissioner of Baltimore, Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, called a news conference yesterday afternoon to deliver an urgent message to a panicked citizenry: Chill out. "It is not," Beilenson said of the cicada invasion that should begin in just a few days, "the end of civilization as we know it." He then provided a scientific estimate for the number of cicadas that will crawl from the ground in Maryland and attach themselves to trees, screen doors and human hair: "in the billions."

The Baltimore City Council last night approved by a voice vote the appointment of Peter L. Beilenson as city health commissioner.The vote on Dr. Beilenson -- who was criticized at a stormy hearing a week ago for failing to notify the council of a plan to offer the Norplant contraceptive to teen-age girls -- came after he promised in a letter to "improve communication and policy coordination."In the Feb. 4 letter to Councilman Lawrence A. Bell III, chairman of the Executive Appointments Committee, Dr. Beilenson promised to establish two community health advisory councils and to "engage in the broadest possible consultation" with the council "prior to any major health policy initiatives."

Howard County's unusual health access program for the uninsured is winning a much warmer reception for the coming budget year, after its county funding barely survived a 3-2 County Council vote last year. "I'm going to support it," Ellicott City Democrat Courtney Watson said at a Tuesday meeting, after praising the program's efforts to attract more private grants and complimenting the health department's expanded "Door to Health" electronic application program. Watson voted against using county money for the program last spring because she said public money should not be used to pay for health coaches to guide patients.

Howard County's health access plan for the uninsured will need another infusion of $500,000 in county funding next fiscal year, though county health officer Dr. Peter L. Beilenson said that in addition to his budget request, he has some new private grants and is seeking more. "We think we're OK asking for level funding," Beilenson said after speaking to a lunchtime gathering of the Association of Community Services on Wednesday at the Owen Brown Interfaith Center in Columbia. Beilenson was referring to past support for the program — a key initiative of County Executive Ken Ulman's — from three of the five County Council members.

More than a decade ago, Baltimore police commanders gathered in a Mount Washington conference room for an extraordinary meeting to lobby 50 city and state lawmakers. They were fed up with being the only group in town charged with ending the violence consuming the city - and the only one blamed for it. The cops wanted judicial reform, such as a community court to deal with petty crimes that clogged the felony docket. They wanted swift and competent justice for the criminals they arrested over and over.

Peter Beilenson appears to believe that the best defense is a good offense. Appearing before the Howard County Council last week, the health officer called Healthy Howard's initial enrollment period "a tremendous success" and vigorously defended the Ulman administration's signature program before the council's lone critic, Fulton Republican Greg Fox, could say anything. The program seeks to extend access to health services to uninsured county residents. Liddy Garcia-Bunuel, director of Healthy Howard Inc., the nonprofit created to run the program, accompanied Beilenson, along with two other program staffers.

Crafting a new way to extend medical services to uninsured residents has proved tricky for county health officials. The health staff was initially overwhelmed in October, when 1,100 people came to the East Columbia library during nine sessions to enroll in Healthy Howard Inc. All but 66 turned out to be eligible for four existing insurance plans for limited-income people. Now county health officer Dr. Peter Beilenson has come up with a new plan to reopen enrollment while trying to counter criticism from County Council member Greg Fox, a Fulton Republican.

Stung by criticism from a County Council member that Howard County's new health access plan has enrolled too few residents, officials are refocusing their efforts to find more people who qualify. Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the county health officer, said yesterday that to ensure continued political support for the Healthy Howard Plan, he is seeking residents who do not have health insurance and who do not qualify for any existing program. The program seeks to provide access to health care to each of the estimated 20,000 limited-income residents who have no insurance.

After nearly two months of checking schools to see if water fountains are turned off and that students aren't drinking from sinks, the city's top health official said yesterday that he is still finding some that have not complied. Each time a school violates city Health Commissioner Dr. Peter L. Beilenson's February order to shut off drinking fountains and label hand sinks "for hand washing only," the school is fined $100. Since March, Beilenson has issued school fines totaling $11,600.

Hiring former Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Peter Beilenson to be Howard County's health officer is part of a larger plan to upgrade county health services, County Executive Ken Ulman said yesterday. Ulman and Beilenson formally announced the change in leadership at a news conference yesterday in Ellicott City. Ulman said he had been thinking during last year's political campaigns of ways to raise the profile of health programs in the county. "Why can't Howard County be a model public health county?"

After just a few enrollment sessions, the county's new health access program for the uninsured attracted so many applicants that sign-up sessions were suspended so staff members could catch up. During the nine sessions, about 1,100 residents representing 716 households filed applications, said the county health officer, Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, and many of the applicants were found eligible for state and federal health insurance programs. The long lines and twice-weekly afternoon sessions at the east Columbia library were so well attended that the sign-ups were suspended, and Beilenson said the enrollment efforts will be redirected.

Turns out Maryland is big enough for more than one guitar-strumming Democrat. Frank Kratovil, the Queen Anne's County state's attorney running for Congress in the 1st District, has a band in his recent past. It appears to have been a back-burner thing compared to the Irish-rock ensemble a certain pol used to front. Kratovil's campaign manager, Tim McCann, even had trouble summoning the group's name when I inquired about it the other day. (I'd asked after hearing Kratovil had taken the stage recently at the big conference for local government officials in Ocean City.