There’s been plenty of chatter on this site about ObamaCare and some of it seems cranked out by the right wing propaganda machine, as Larry Gross astutely calls it.
Among the more shrill critiques is that it is not “free market” based, is way too expensive, adds to our dangerously booming debt and budget deficit, violates the supposed “Commerce Clause” (which to the conservatives applies only to medical insurance, not auto insurance which is also mandatory) and lastly, may not be even necessary.
If you are on who believes that last point, maybe you should hop in your car and drive way, way out to the coalfields of Southwest Virginia, specifically to the town of Wise and the Wise County Fairgrounds. It will take you more than six hours and you will be farther west than Cleveland and almost on the latitude of Detroit.
Starting today and lasting through Sunday, doctors, dentists, nurses and other health care professionals from the surrounding area will be offering free checkups, outpatient treatment, eyeglasses and dental checks to the the mountain country poor, many of whom work for minimum wage, are not eligible for Medicaid and can’t afford regular health insurance.
The free health event has been organized in the area for the past 11 years by British-born adventurer Stan Brock, a former anacodona wrestler who started the non-profit Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. “It does help people who have fallen through the cracks,” Frank
Kilgore, a lawyer in nearby St. Paul and social activist, told me.
About 3,000 people show up for the event that begins today and runs through Sunday. They are the core of the Central Appalachian poor, who have worked at Wal-Mart, farmed rocky soil and survived the boom and bust cycle of coal mines. Folks from southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky go to the Wise event. Besdies the economic challenges, the up and down topography of the region can make a trip to the doctor’s office and multi-hour event.
The question now is whether so-called Obama-care, which is now law, will make the free health clinic unnecessary. The law is designed to help provide 32 million uninsured Americans with health insurance, in part by requiring all to obtain it or face penalties. Low income people like them will have available exchanges to provide competing plans and subsidies to help pay for them, providing they meet certain income guidelines.
It will take at least a few years to see if those goals can be achieved. Meanwhile, Kilgore says other strategies afoot in the region are to open a medical school in Southwest Virginia that will specialize in training family and rural practice physicians who are desperately needed in remote areas like Wise County.
Kilgore’s hopeful the medical school approach will further turn things around. “It’s pathetic that one of the world’s richest countries has this sort of thing going on,” he told me.
No argument there.
Peter Galuszka
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