“60 Minutes” returns to Remote Area Medical
Time has dulled the memory of my first visit to a Remote Area Medical (RAM) clinic in Wise, Virginia in 2009. I drove up after seeing insurance industry whistleblower, Wendell Potter, discuss his visit to Wise with Bill Moyers. I wrote about my visit for Huffington Post. I wrote here about my last visit in 2016. Even with Obamacare, these Americans get left behind. The poor, mostly, and the working poor. Out of work. Laid off. Or unemployable.
Until the “60 Minutes” segment on Sunday night, I had not considered that the Republican move to eliminate Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies as of January 1st might drive up demand for care at RAM’s free medical clinics. Neither “60 Minutes” nor RAM spokespersons address that. But when I displayed the sign below to commuters that first week of January, drivers held up fingers: three, five, six. And those were people who’d had ACA insurance and might lose it after losing the subsidies.
Scott Pelley and company write that what Potter and I saw years ago hasn’t let up. Demand has increased almost eight-fold:
About one third of Americans say they have skipped meals, borrowed money, or cut back on utilities to pay for health care. That’s in a Gallup poll released in March. The Trump administration has lowered prices on more than 50 drugs. But it also let premiums rise — even double — in the Affordable Care marketplace and made the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid. Already, 3 million have lost insurance and it’s estimated it’ll be 10 million in three years. All of this reminded us of our story in 2008, about a charity called Remote Area Medical. RAM started out parachuting doctors into South American jungles. But in the 1990s, it turned to another isolated people: Americans cut off from health care by the cost. Recently, we returned to RAM at one of its free, pop-up clinics. For Americans long on pain and short on hope, RAM is a ray of mercy in the darkness.
The parking lot in Knoxville, Tennessee began to fill early. In a frigid February, many drove hundreds of miles in desperation. Nearby, Remote Area Medical would open a clinic inside an empty exhibit hall. But RAM can take only so many patients on a weekend, so they join the line days before. We met Sandra Tallent at 5 a.m.
What RAM founder Stan Brock told me years ago about red tape keeping physicians and dentists from donating their services across state lines has improved. Just not enough. What the U.S. needs, one dentist tells “60 Minutes,” is a domestic law that allows Doctors Without Borders. But for the medical lobby, we might one.
Here’s the Wendell Potter segment with Bill Moyers that first sent me to Virginia.