The Uninsured Line Up For Care In Rural Virginia

This weekend was the tenth anniversary of Remote Area Medical's free health fair in Wise County, VA. Stan Brock founded Knoxville-based RAM in 1985 to insert mobile medical teams into remote areas of third-world countries. Now over 60 percent of RAM's work is in rural areas of the United States.

More than one thousand people arrived before sunup this Friday or camped out in their vehicles for a chance at health care they cannot afford to buy. Most are the working poor and hail from Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and other surrounding states. Cars in the county fairgrounds parking lot held comforters and pillows, sleeping bags and sleeping people.

RAM's event is a county fair without the funnel cakes and cotton candy, but with the long lines and wait times you'd find at Disney World. First-come, first-served. Patients appreciate the help RAM provides more than your average Medicare patient, someone said, because they have invested their time in it.

Private doctors and nurses provide much of the medical manpower, alongside students and faculty from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University. Local Lions Clubs help with the eye wear. Churches help with the food. There were 1,800 volunteers in all, about as many as daily patients.

A RAM "expedition" is like a MASH unit, a mobile field hospital with customized trailers, tents and desert-tan, soft-sided huts erected to shelter eye exams and minor surgery. Compressed air hoses snake along the concrete floor in the dental areas. Rows of laptops set up in the animal barn register patients' personal data and print tracking stickers for treatment forms.

Wise is at once inspiring and deeply disturbing. Fifty-six hundred patients received treatment in Wise last year. So many come that some have to be turned away.

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine checked in patients on Friday. He told the Kingsport, TN Times News, "A weekend a year is no substitute for health care reform... this exemplifies the need for health care reform in our nation."

But the reform will not be simple. In the last superpower left standing, thousands without health care wait in line outdoors for hours to get basic medical treatment provided by a volunteer organization intended to service the third world.

A week earlier, at the Cocke County, TN RAM expedition, founderBrock told CNN, "Nothing would please me more than for us to be put out of business here in the United States so that we can concentrate on these places where the need is so, so desperate."

Few Americans will see news from Wise, however. Aside from a couple of wire services and local press, the American mainstream media was largely absent for this year's Wise expedition.

CBS's "60 Minutes" ran a piece on RAM last year. CNN covered a much smaller RAM event the week before. They are done. Thousands of Americans waiting in the Appalachian pre-dawn to have teeth pulled is old news.

Meanwhile, reporters from German television, the BBC, Agence France Presse, RTL TV (Netherlands) and Kristeligt Dagblad (Denmark) sent teams to Wise County to document the spectacle of thousands of Americans getting their health care from a once-a-year field hospital.

When reason no longer persuades and empathy is dismissed as weakness, perhaps it is time for old-fashioned shame.

Another volunteer - an attorney - related this patient story: an older woman examined for new glasses asked if she would be getting them that day. She would. It would be her first new pair of glasses in a decade.

"You mean I'll be able to read my Bible tonight?" she asked. She hadn't been able to read it for years.

Comments

[temenos]

Here is link to BBC's coverage of RAM's efforts to help the poor in Tennessee last year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm

[bitterfly77]

This story needs to be front and center. Please, please, please put it on your front page. In this time of healthcare reform on the chopping board, we *must* give it full coverage. Forget the Republican birthsters and the teabagging feud with Dobbs and Maddow. This is LIFE or DEATH information that must receive appropriate coverage. Let us do Walter Cronkite proud for once! We're in a position to do something about the shameful state of American media.

[xianred]

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, move this story to the top of the front page! I have had to search and search for it to share it with others. This is a critical story and should not be buried - everyone in America needs to see what "the best health care in the world" really looks like in action. (And everyone needs to know of the work of RAM.)

This article, along with Frank Schaeffer's: Health Care vs. White House Beer http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/health-care-vs-white-hous_b_246242.html
and the story about the number of Americans outsourcing their health care to India http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/27/americans-outsourcing-hea_n_245310.html
should be front and center.

[taptaptap]

Tom, this important story needs to be on the front page in red font as large as the Dobbs-Maddow Teabagging Showdown. The fight for health care reform has been the hot topic for weeks. Conservatives trot out a Canadian who goes to the US for medical treatment (a dubious story) and it's replayed all over the airwaves. The GOP, drunk with lobbyist money, and realizing that yelling "socialism" no longer scares people, now say health care reform will kill you, will lead to the suicide and murder of seniors. Don't get me started on the Blue Dogs. Where are the stories presenting the other side? A thousand Americans being treated in animal stalls is beyond tragic. Where are the advocates for the poor? Corporate-owned MSM have failed their public. America is the richest nation in the world. And it appears, one of the least humane.

[xianred]

This is America's Shame! That its citizens would have to line up before sunrise at a fairgrounds so they can be treated in animal stalls. If this isn't third world, I don't know what is. How can people still insist that America has the best health care in the world? There are none so blind as those who will not see. But the rest of the world sees. Foreign reporters from the BBC, German TV, France, Denmark, the Netherlands come to see how this "best health care in the world" really works. God bless Stan Brock and Remote Area Medical for their work to provide care to "remote" America.

[concentric1]

Yet many of those persons lined up would vote against a public option for health care or for a candidate who supports healthcare for all. How sick is that? An electorate that would vote against their own interest. What does that say about these Americans?

[peacekitten]

that they have been brainwashed.

[ByersL]

Mr. Sullivan, thank you for covering this. I hope this blog puts this up as their lead story.

[peacekitten]

it does belong as the lead story. the idea of so many americans having to rely on health care from a source originally begun to serve third world countries is unbelievable.

[ByersL]

Huffpo, this need to be your top story. THIS is why we need a public option to keep prices down. This is the USA, but we look like a third world country here. What is wrong with us that we can't want the best for our people?

[LDnearthesea]

What is wrong is the corporate media putting on the corporate insurance ads telling people lies.