Feb. 13, Michael L. Davis, economics professor at the Cox School of Business, SMU Dallas, for a commentary framing the proposed new Children’s Medical Center Dallas as more than a healthcare asset, but also an attractive sign of a healthy growing community. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading A bigger, better children’s hospital in Dallas is worth celebrating: http://tinyurl.com/4fybwsdr
If you’re depressed about current events — and if you’re not, you haven’t been paying attention — let me try and cheer you up by telling you a story. It’s a story about chickens and eggs and children. Especially children.
I’ll start my story with the happy ending: Children’s Health System of Texas and UT Southwestern Medical Center just announced plans to build a brand-new hospital for kids. The new facility will be significantly bigger and more advanced than the current Children’s Medical Center Dallas. It will cost $5 billion and will not require taxpayer money.
This is a sign of a healthy, caring and growing community
Michael L. Davis
If you’re depressed about current events — and if you’re not, you haven’t been paying attention — let me try and cheer you up by telling you a story. It’s a story about chickens and eggs and children. Especially children.
I’ll start my story with the happy ending: Children’s Health System of Texas and UT Southwestern Medical Center just announced plans to build a brand-new hospital for kids. The new facility will be significantly bigger and more advanced than the current Children’s Medical Center Dallas. It will cost $5 billion and will not require taxpayer money.
The chicken-and-egg part of the story goes like this: When the current Children’s hospital was built in 1967, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was home to a bit less than 2 million people. When the new hospital opens in about 7 years, the population will have risen to over 8 million people. More people mean more kids. More kids mean more sick kids. We need the bigger hospital.
But what about the chicken-and-egg question? Is population growth driving the demand for a bigger hospital or is the hospital driving population growth? Both things are true.
Now that might at first seem silly. Very few people move because of a children’s hospital. But people do move to places that have the infrastructure they need. That infrastructure includes both public projects like hospitals and private infrastructure like housing. And, importantly, it also includes community infrastructure that has little to do with governmen, things like churches, kids’ sports leagues and charitable organizations.
And the newcomers don’t just need more stuff. Before they move, they need to know that the strange new place they’re moving to will continue to get things done. Much has been made about the masses of people moving from California to Texas. Census figures report a net migration of over 100,000 people per year since the pandemic.
From the Texas side, the account is too often full of puffed-up braggadocio spouted by ungracious blowhards. But there can be no doubt that one of the reasons California is shrinking is because it is plagued with a special kind of corrosive gridlock. New buildings, policy initiatives and the rest are just easier here than other places. If you live with California’s housing prices and declining sense of community, you might not expect things to get better. Here, there is hope it will.
Of course, we need to make sure our community doesn’t succumb to the same self-induced stagnation as these other places. Here in Texas we point to the exodus from California in part because the decline of other communities — Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis and other cities — happened years ago, beginning in the 1970s. There’s just not as many people left to leave. Yes, we should celebrate living in a growing, vibrant community; it’s much better to live in a place where the children’s hospital is adding capacity and not closing doors. But we need to understand that without care and thought, this could end.
So that’s the chicken-and-egg part of the story. More chickens are making more eggs, which are making more chickens. It’s a happy story and we should all work to keep it going.
But this happy story isn’t just about our community, it’s also about children. Yes, we need a bigger children’s hospital because the community is growing and that means more sick kids. But we also need a better hospital because we now have more ways to make sick kids healthy.
When the current Children’s hospital was built the child mortality rate was about 30 per 1,000. The current rate is about 7 per 1,000, a 75% decrease. If you have kids in school, just know that they’re playing with other kids who, 60 years ago, would have died. Most of this happened because places like Children’s developed and administered new therapies to treat everything from premature birth to cancer to trauma.
As new ways to save lives become available, new facilities are needed to get them to the sick kids. The new facility won’t just be bigger, it will operate better and thus have increasingly better outcomes. We may not witness every improvement, but we’ll hear about the kids who made it, and the statistics will bear that out.
None of this good news makes the bad news any better. But maybe it puts it in perspective. Many things are getting better. Celebrate your community and the people around you. It’s worth it.
Michael L. Davis is an economics professor at the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business.
