Re-reported, edited by Carolyn Bennett

“… In this country if you’re poor — you don’t have much of a shot,” says Stan Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, an organization originally created “to help poor tribes in the former British colony of Guyana, South America,” now devoting “60 percent” of its work to helping residents of the United States of America.

Remote Area Medical (established 1985) is a publicly-supported all-volunteer organization, an airborne relief corps of volunteer doctors, nurses, pilots, veterinarians and support workers participating in expeditions across the world. They work at their own expense and use donated medical supplies, medicines, facilities and vehicles.

RAM provides free health care, dental care, eye care, veterinary services, and technical and educational assistance to people in remote areas of the United States and the world.

An organization designed to bring free medicine into remote areas of Third World countries now helps thousands of the estimated 47 million Americans who have no health insurance and others who are underinsured. … in urban and rural America — what are we supposed to make of that?” CBS News Sixty Minutes’ interviewer Scott Pelley asks Brock.

Aired on that CBS program was a RAM expedition to Knoxville, Tennessee, where on a weekend scores of people lined up for medical services from Remote Area Medical. That weekend volunteers “saw 920 patients, made 500 pairs of glasses, did 94 mammograms, extracted 1,066 teeth and did 567 fillings.” But, said Stan Brock, “400 people were turned away.” The lousy part of this job, he said, “is that we can’t do everybody… we’re just seeing the thousands and thousands of people that we can. The rest of them, unfortunately, have got to do the best they can without us.”

A Bristol Herald piece in July told the story of a RAM event that saved a Southwest Virginia woman’s life. Dorothy Taulbee, 71, had gone to that area’s Health Wagon Remote Area Medical the year before. She arrived at the event with a personal list of checks she wanted clinic workers to attend to but they went farther than her checklist and saved her life. “A RAM prescreening revealed cancer in Taulbee’s right lung” and, as it was discovered early, she “was able to have surgery quickly to remove part of her lung.”

That story about the Southwest Virginia RAM event brought several comments about health care in America. One of the longer ones (with some editing, capitals are orignal writer's) came from a writer who called himself John. “We DO have the best health care” in the United States, he said. ”We just have a VERY bad health care SYSTEM. In other words, you can get the best care in the world—

IF you have insurance or
IF you have money to pay for it;
If you have neither, you are just out of luck.

“The U.S. is the ONLY developed country in the WORLD that does not have some form of national health care.

“It is also the ONLY country in the WORLD that considers the health of its people … a PROFIT BUSINESS.

“But what can you expect? Our Senator for years was a member of a family that made MANY MILLIONS in the health care business. We now have a MILLIONARE DOCTOR for a congressman. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.…”

Among the physicians elected to Congress, 11 are Republicans and 5 are Democrats. Two serve in the Senate and 14 in the House of Representatives; seven of these are on three committees preparing current health care legislation.

Sources

“Fault Limes — Health Care Reform,” Al Jazeera, August 6, 2009,
“It is the biggest challenge Barack Obama, the US president, has to face in his first year in office: fixing a healthcare system in crisis. Plagued by both spiraling costs and tens of millions uninsured, lawmakers have worked at a feverish pitch debating how to re-tool what accounts for nearly one fifth of the American economy. Meanwhile, this broken system is highly profitable for many…” http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/faultlines/2009/08/20098663722846685.html

Remote Area Medical, Pioneers of No-cost Health Care, Remote Area Medical Foundation1834 Beech Street, Knoxville, TN 37920, 865-579-1530, http://www.ramusa.org/index.html; http://www.ramusa.org/; http://www.ramusa.org/about/mission.htm
“U.S. Health Care Gets Boost from Charity—‘60 Minutes’: Remote Area Medical Finds It's Needed In America To Plug Health Insurance Gap,” CBS News 60 Minutes, July 13, 2008,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/28/60minutes/main3889496_page4.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
“Remote Area Medical Clinic Set for Return This Weekend,” Bristol Herald Courier (RAM event Bristol, Wise County, Virginia), July 20, 2009,
“Medical charity helping US poor,” BBC News, May 29, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm
“For Doctors in Congress, Little Harmony on Health Care, July 11, 2009, New York Times (Andrea Fuller), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/health/policy/12docs.html?_r=1

Physicians in the U.S. House and Senate

Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., MD (R, La.), cardiovascular surgeon
Rep. Paul Broun, MD (R, Ga.), Family physician
Rep. Michael C. Burgess, MD (R, Texas), Obstetrician-gynecologist
Rep. Bill Cassidy, MD (R, La.), Gastroenterologist/internist
Del. Donna M.C. Christensen, MD (D, Virgin Islands), Family physician
Rep. John Fleming, MD (R, La.), Family physician
Rep. Phil Gingrey, MD (R, Ga.), Obstetrician-gynecologist
Rep. Parker Griffith, MD (D, Ala.), Radiation oncologist
Rep. Steve Kagen, MD (D, Wis.), Allergist/immunologist
Rep. Jim McDermott, MD (D, Wash.), Psychiatrist
Rep. Ron Paul, MD (R, Texas), Obstetrician-gynecologist
Rep. Tom Price, MD (R, Ga.), orthopedic surgeon
Rep. Phil Roe, MD (R, Tenn.), Obstetrician-gynecologist
Rep. Vic Snyder, MD (D, Ark.), Family physician
Sen. John Barrasso, MD (R, Wyo.), orthopedic surgeon
Sen. Tom Coburn, MD (R, Okla.), Obstetrician-gynecologist
American Medical Association, http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/02/23/gvsa0223.htm
House Office of the Historian

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