A Fred Friendly Seminar, hosted by journalist John Hockenberry,

premieres November 11 at 10 p.m. on PBS

(Check local listings for October airdates preceding the premiere.

Times and dates will vary.)

National Outreach Campaign in communities across the country will engage the public in dialogue about meeting the challenges posed by chronic illness.

A teenaged girl with asthma and her family are stuck in an unending cycle of life-threatening attacks, emergency room treatment from harried doctors, and missed days of work that they can ill afford. A stroke victim is released from the hospital into the custody of his frightened, bewildered wife who must care for him on a daily basis without adequate help, training or money. A man suffering from both depression and diabetes arrives in the emergency room nearly comatose, but doctors can’t treat him safely because there is no way to find out what medications he is taking.

People with serious chronic illnesses are America’s most costly and fastest-growing group of patients but our nation’s health care system remains focused on acute care, which constitutes a significantly smaller percentage of medical care. Coping with long-term chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s or heart disease, millions of people are faced with agonizing decisions every day as they struggle with a health care system not designed to meet their medical needs or provide necessary care giving. While the list of chronic illnesses is long and diverse, the people who suffer from them and their families share many common problems.

In probing the Socratic dialogue format pioneered by Fred Friendly, Who Cares: Chronic Illness in America explores the challenging scenarios that are playing out in homes and hospitals every day as families and health care professionals deal with chronic illness. John Hockenberry, correspondent for Dateline NBC, moderates the one-hour program, which premieres on PBS on November 11 at 10 p.m. (Check local listings for October air dates preceding the premiere. Times and dates will vary.) The program brings together a diverse group of doctors, patients, caregivers, and experts who get to the core of the complex factors that have thrown the American health care system into crisis and complicated the lives of families dealing with chronic illness. Under Hockenberry’s direction, the panel draws on their personal expertise to role play in hypothetical situations that reveal the urgent and often desperate problems that can arise when chronic illness bumps up against the limits of the medical system.

Adding a new dimension to the classic format, a series of brief, dramatic vignettes throughout the program frame the issues and set up the hypothetical situations that have always been the signature of Fred Friendly Seminars. This edition of the classic PBS series also debuts a redesigned set that provides a bright and contemporary context for the discussion.

In the first scenario, a low-income family without health insurance must make impossible choices when it comes to caring for their daughter’s asthma condition. Time and again, she winds up in the emergency room after an acute attack. The E.R. is all they have, but it’s only a temporary remedy. “I know she’s going to be in here again soon,” says Eleanor Thornton, director of community outreach for asthma care at Howard University’s College of Medicine, who role plays the distressed mother. “We can’t get the appropriate care we need for her. I know that the emergency room is just a quick fix, but that’s what we have to do.” Worse, with every attack, the parents must leave work to go to the hospital, risking their jobs in the process. As they scrape to pay for their daughter’s medicine, this family is on the verge of collapse from stress and fear. “What do you think your daughter’s future is, going from E.R. to E.R. to E.R.?” asks Hockenberry. “I’m scared,” answers Thornton. “I know this can take her life from her. I’m terrified.”

In the next scenario that Hockenberry sets up, doctors determine that a stroke victim’s vital signs have stabilized, and he must be released. The hospital bed is needed. But that leaves his wife and family scrambling for answers. “All they want to do is shove you out as fast as they can and then you’re on your own,” says Suzanne Mintz, president of the National Family Caregivers Association, who plays the role of the patient’s wife.