The government’s decision to shutter D.C. General Hospital in May 2001 split the city. Poor folks who depended on the ramshackle medical facility on the west bank of the Anacostia River were furious. D.C. General had served as the city’s public hospital for nearly 200 years. Closing it became a symbol of the city’s neglect of poor African Americans who lived east of the river. Why, they wondered, were so many top-notch hospitals in Georgetown and Upper Caucasia? Advocates rallied and marched. Politicians took sides and hunkered down. The city’s sick worried.

A decade later, is the nation’s capital in better health? Can poor folks get decent medical care? Do we need another D.C. General?