Newsweek: Doctors Within Borders - RAM (Remote Area Medical) Visit Rural VA

[RamboLiberal]

What the massive turnout for a free medical and dental clinic in southwest Virginia reveals about the widening gap between health-care haves and have-nots in the United States

Sheila Fowler is 43. She has short brown hair, a soft, girlish voice and three grandchildren. What she does not have is teeth, or a way to pay for dentures. But Fowler is stoic; she jokes that she's got tough gums, adding that she can even eat pretzels if she sucks on them for a bit.

Fowler has made the hour-long journey from her home in Cleveland, Va., to the small town of Wise to take advantage of a huge annual medical and dental expedition set up by Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit organization that provides basic medical and dental care to people in the world's most inaccessible regions. This year, more than 1,800 volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and assistants descended on the small town near the Kentucky border, setting up enormous field-hospital-style tents in which they saw roughly 2,500 patients over the course of two and a half days in late July. The Wise operation is coordinated locally by a team of nurses with the Health Wagon, a tiny health care outreach program.

By the end of the weekend, the medical team, had extracted 3,857 painfully decayed teeth, administered 156 mammograms, screened hundreds of people for diabetes and heart disease, and given out 1,003 pairs of eyeglasses. About 30 people, chosen by lottery, were fitted for free dentures. Hundreds of people were turned away by volunteers who headed off cars at the main intersection when the clinic reached capacity.

RAM events such as the one in Wise—the Knoxville, Tenn.-based group runs about 15 similar clinics around the world every year, from Guyana to East Africa and rural parts of Appalachia—underscore the health-care dilemma of the poorest Americans. Fowler's case is a prime example: She has almost no income after an auto accident left her unable to do her restaurant job. She's covered by the state Medicaid program, but Medicaid doesn't cover any preventive or routine dental care for adults. It will pay for emergency extractions, but, for Fowler, as for
many others in areas where dentists are scarce, finding one that will take Medicaid payments isn't easy. That's why she came to Wise in 2003 to have her teeth pulled for free.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/150846

The shame of this nation when we have to depend on charity we would normally give to third-world countries to take care of our own!