Recently 60 Minutes did a spot on Remote Health Care and I was so impressed with their work and so saddened that America has come to this that I wanted to share part of that piece with you.
Remote Health Care was initially established to get emergency health care to areas where the needs were the greatest and expecting it to be in some remote area of the Amazon or other foreign countries. Today this charity organization is finding that it is Americans in America that are the most in need and they are throwing the lifeline.
Recently Remote Area Medical set up a massive weekend clinic in an exhibit hall in Knoxville, TN. There were dentists, optometrists, general practitioners and others who were prepared to work with whatever came through the doors. Virtually everything they use for these clinics is donated and the care is free. The big question to be answered was how many patients would come. There were 276 volunteers from 11 states ready to help.
Stan Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, opened the outside gate around midnight though the clinic wouldn’t open until 7:00 AM . People in pain were already there, ready to get in line for the much needed care. The Tennessee National Guards were also there for crowd control. Again, this is America. Numbered slips of paper were handed out to those seeking medical care. It was 27 degreees and gas was at $3. per gallon, so though most sat in cars throughout the night, few stayed warm running the engine for heat.
This was RAM's 524th expedition. RAM took off in 1992, airlifting relief to Latin America. And at age 71, Stan Brock still flies the antique fleet. One of their planes, a C-47, flew on D-Day.
Brock is British by birth, and an adventurer at heart. He was a cowboy in the Amazon and then, incredibly, he was discovered by TV's "Wild Kingdom." Brock was a star for the program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Today Brock is devoted to RAM - completely devoted. He has no family, takes no salary, and has no home. Brock lives in an abandoned school that the city of Knoxville leases to RAM for $1. Until recently, he took showers in the courtyard with a hose.
Mark Tankersley drove 200 miles to the clinic and slept in the parking lot for hours with his wife and daughter. He had been in very excruciating pain from an infected tooth. Most who arrived had heard about the clinic by word of mouth or on the news. Hundreds more came. The clinic would take anyone... but just for the weekend.
Brock says he was surprised at the number of people who came when he set up the first "expedition" in the U.S. "And the numbers are getting higher. And I don't know if it's because we're getting better known, or that the healthcare in this country is getting worse,". For those who were diagnosed with cancer on that particular day, or other ailments like diabetes and heart disease, RAM will try to find a volunteer doctor who will follow up.
Dr. Ross Isaacs, one of the volunteers, described the patients as "...the working poor middle of their lives most with families, most not substance abusers and employed without adequate insurance." He’s the doctor who saw Mark Tankersly but he learned that Taknersley , from Dalton, GA, had additional medical problems. Besides the painful tooth, Tankersly had previously had two heart attacks and heart surgery a few years earlier, but virtually no follow-up since then. He was underinsured and although he worked driving a truck,and had major medical insurance through his employer, the deductible was $500. which made it unaffordable. The dental insurance was also too expensive.
Dr Isaacs said "He's the lucky one he could drive the 200 miles. He's the lucky one who got to see people today and get hooked in. There are tens of hundreds of thousands of people like him," No one really knows just how many there are.
When asked how he pays for all of the care and supplies, Stan Brock responded "In the first place we really know how to stretch the dollar. We operate entirely on the generosity of the American people. I'd like to say that we had big corporate support in America but we don’t. So it’s the little checks from those people who send in the $5 and $10." RAM operates on a shoestring budget of about $250,000 a year. Yet, last year, it treated 17,000 patients.
Brock said they treated approximately 600 people the first day and while 15 were turned away, they would be able to return the next day. The next day was Sunday, hundreds more came and more tickets were handed out.
Nurse Practitioner Teresa Gardner brought a portable women’s health clinic from Wise, Va. She became worried about Rebecca McWilliams who had undergone surgery in 2005 for cervical cancer and had not had the recommended follow-up. Mrs. McWilliams said it had been about 2 years since her last pap smear and she was advised to have one every six months. When asked why she would take such a terrible risk by waiting so long, Mrs. McWilliams,28, said it was very hard to afford since she has three children and her husband had lost his job.
McWilliams' pap smear came back clear, but in her exam Gardner found reason to worry. "I think just from the clinical inspection of the cervix that, you know, possibly, there is a possibility that cancer, you know, still being there," Gardner explained.
A reporter, asked Brock "You created this medical organization designed to go into Third World countries to go into remote places, and now doing 60 percent of your work in urban and rural America, what are we supposed to make of that?"
"For the 50 million or so people in this country, the one thing that is on their mind is 'What if I have a catastrophic event, a car crash, a heart attack,'" he replied. "'Because I either have no health insurance or I'm underinsured.' And, so this is a very, very weighty thing to be thinking about, knowing that your family is in great jeopardy."
Late Sunday, Joanne Ford's number was among the last. She's retired, living on disability with no insurance, and her glasses don't work anymore. She got in only to find out the vision care line had closed. Someone at RAM noticed Ford's situation. They put her in the vision care line and examined her for a new pair of glasses.
But, there were 400 people who had no numbers, waiting at the gate when the clinic closed. Those had to be turned away. During the weekend, RAM saw 920 patients, made 500 pairs of glasses, did 94 mammograms, extracted 1,066 teeth and did 567 fillings
"Yeah, you know, that's the lousy part of this job. I mean, it's nice to be able to know that you've helped a bunch of people. But the reality is that we can't do everybody. At the moment, we're just seeing the thousands and thousands of people that we can, and the rest of them, unfortunately, have got to do the best they can without us," Brock said.
Here is a link to the CBS video of the program, but you have to sit through the commercials and it won't embed in this BLOG. http://www.cbsnews.com/...