[DrKirkNoliss]

In Canada, you can walk,crawl,limp your way into a hospital and expect to be treated.




Last-resort healthcare for sick, destitute
BY: CHRIS SMYTH, IN SEWANEE, TENNESSEE From: The Australian May 26, 2012 12:00AM

Flat out tending to Tennessee's poor. Hundreds queue overnight for free treatment at the Remote Area Medical facility run by British founder Stan Brock. Picture: Chris Smyth/The Times Source: The Times
AS dawn breaks over the remote western foothills of the Appalachians, hundreds of the sick and the desperate climb out of the cars where they have been waiting all night and line up in front of a former English public schoolboy, turned cowboy.

At 6am they file one-by-one into a sports centre converted for the day into a charity clinic offering free medical care. At the Remote Area Medical facility, the running track is blocked by makeshift consulting rooms and soon the athletics hall is filled with the whir of dentists' drills.

Unable to afford treatment any other way, 400 have camped out overnight, and one couple have driven 11 hours from Chicago to be here. These are the people for whom US President Barack Obama fought a bruising political battle to reform US healthcare, which will come to a head in the Supreme Court next month. Yet in Sewanee, Tennessee, he is not being thanked for it.


Terry Bailey, 38, is one of those who waits patiently to be seen. He needs a filling and adds he has constant pain in his knees and elbows, the result of a car accident five years ago and falling down a 4m ladder since then.


Mr Bailey, a construction worker, has had no health insurance for years, since the company he works for was restructured. "Back then I had insurance. But I got laid off and when I came back they'd changed the rules." The $US120 ($123) a week cost of the scheme is too high for a man with three children to feed, he says. "You wouldn't have much pay cheque left."

At the clinic, Mr Bailey is diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and given a wrist splint and low-cost prescriptions for steroids to help his knees and neck. He seems pleased the doctor, who works locally, has agreed to see him for a follow-up appointment.

Mr Obama's healthcare reforms are designed to help Mr Bailey and others by offering them subsidised coverage. But he has never heard of the plan. In this, he is not alone; most of the people were unaware of the President's reforms. Of those who were, all but one opposed them. Although they will probably benefit from one element or other of the changes, there were repeated complaints about one factor - that people can be fined for not buying health insurance.

Julia Champion, 52, adds another reason. "I didn't vote for him (Obama) last time and I won't vote for him again; I can't stand his wife."

Ms Champion was laid off four years ago from her job as an office manager and has not been covered since. She was first in line at the clinic because her sight has deteriorated so much that she struggles to drive - yet continues to do so - and can no longer make out the birds she used to watch from her house.

She cannot afford glasses, but at the clinic she is given an eye test and a free pair of spectacles within an hour. She goes home happy. "I wouldn't ever have afforded them and I'd be as blind as a bat. I love the little hummingbirds. I'm going to go out in the woods and see them now."

For others the solution is more drastic. Patti Nunly is 28; she has come to the clinic to have all her teeth removed. "They're all bad and they've hurt for a long time. I just said I want all of them out," she says.

Ms Nunly, who has worked intermittently as a cleaner and has two children, attributes her blackened teeth to "dipping [tobacco] and smoking". Barely half an hour later she emerges from the dentist's chair, her mouth stuffed with bloody swabs. She is unable to speak, but gives a firm thumbs-up. Is it less painful than before? She nods her head.

The 30 rows of dentists' chairs are the busiest part of the clinic, and over the course of a weekend dentists, some working two chairs at a time, remove 775 teeth.

Waiting patients watch stoically from the sports stands nearby. One woman, Dianne Binkley, confides: "I stayed with my ex-husband for several years before I got a divorce because he had good health insurance."

There are 42 patients still waiting when the exhausted dentists finish for the day. Donna Smith, 46, bursts into tears when she is told that she will not be seen after waiting for 18 hours. "It's not fair. I've been here all day. I didn't have no sleep, no feed, no nothing," she says. But all 42 were able to return the next morning, according to Stan Brock, RAM's founder. Mr Brock, 76 years old, but fit and wiry under a military-style uniform, oversees about 20 such events every year and says that he would do more if other states followed Tennessee in allowing doctors from out of state to treat patients without charge.

Mr Brock left Canford School in Dorset, in Britain, at 17 to work as a rancher in British Guiana, where his father was in the colonial service. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became an accidental star on US television after an NBC producer was impressed by his lassoing skills.

He remained in the US and started RAM in 1985 to bring doctors to the Wapishana people of Guyana. "Round about 1991 I got a call from Hancock County, Tennessee," he says. "Their only dentist had just left and they said 'We've heard you do this stuff, any chance you could come and do dentistry in Hancock County?' We loaded up and there was quite a line of people there. We got a call from the next county over. Pretty soon we were doing one a week."

Mr Brock, too, is dismissive of the Obama health reforms, which he says will do little to reduce demand for RAM's services because they do not make dental coverage universal, nor do they get to the root of poor health.

The Times