Although he’s only been on the job two-and-a-half weeks as head of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Michael Young is already setting a tone similar to the one he successfully employed to turn around our public hospital, ECMC. Grady is the public hospital in Atlanta, and the biggest one in Georgia. It’s also saddled with huge debt, as was ECMC when he arrived here.

Here’s one story covering his arrival, and a couple more stories describing his first actions, pulled from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. If his aggressive, hands-on approach to turning things around is as successful there as it was in Erie County, the citizens will benefit.

On the other hand, he still seems unafraid of kowtowing to the status quo, which may again place him at odds with the established private hospitals in the area. Still, one gets the sense that Young was never in the hospital business to win a golden parachute. As he once told me: “Hospitals don’t have to lose money. They can be run well, like any other business—if that’s what you want to do. You just have to want to do that.”