A four-day Free Health Clinic took place in Sacramento, California this past weekend. Not an area you might immediately think as impoverished or lacking in medical facilities, and yet as the Sacramento Bee reports:
Melissa Jones, 43, wrapped herself in a blanket and slept on the sidewalk early Friday morning just to get a chance to feel her fingers once again.
Debba Brown showed up at midnight, three hours before volunteers began issuing admission slips for the 5:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. clinic. Uninsured for 10 years, Brown was looking for a dentist, an eye doctor and a physician whom she could talk to about whether she needs a liver transplant.
Jennifer Smith, 20, an Oregon native who has been living in a camper with her fiancé while she looks for work, got a session with Red Bluff cardiologist Dr. Dean Scofield to see if he could diagnose searing pain on her side that makes her nauseous and dizzy. "I've been wanting to know what is wrong," she said.
These are just three of approximately thirty-four hundred people who got help (with many more who were turned away due to limits on time and resources) at the 639th Free Health Clinic run by Remote Area Medical.
Dr. Scofield, one of the volunteer doctors (God bless them, and I'm an atheist) noted:
"...there are a lot of unmet needs.
It is sort of sad in the United States that there is such a lapse in medical care that people have to sit out here for five or six hours" to be seen..."
Dr. Scofield, I must respectifully disagree. It's not sad. Its disgusting. It's cruel. And it borders on criminal -- if not legally then ethically.
A country which can spend $100,000,000,000 a year on an unwinnable war in another country whose citizens go berzerk killing innocent people because some crazed Christianist wacko burns a Koran, yet cannot provide basic health care for its own citizens is, indeed, disgusting. And cruel. And ethically bankrupt.
While Republican plutocrats sit with their legislative puppets in Congress figuring new and better ways to take from the poor and give to the rich, Mellissa Jones sleeps on a sidewalk waiting for her one shot at medical care.
While Scott Walker schemes with faux-Koch on the phone, Debba Brown waits all night to talk to a doctor.
While Blue Dog Democrats and the Administration make nice with those who never saw a Government program they didn't want to cut unless it involved a Defense contract and a large corporation, Jennifer Smith, unemployed, deals with searing pain that makes her nauseous and dizzy on a daily basis.
This coming weekend, after Congress has recessed for two weeks after passing legislation that will create millions of hundreds of thousands of tens of thousands of thousands of hundreds of tens of no jobs that anyone is aware of, and has helped solve the health care problems of the nation no one, thousands of people will be served by hundreds of volunteers and Remote Area Medical staff at another free clinic, this time in Oakland, California.
If you'd like to replace the entire Congress with the RAM volunteers and the RAM staff who organize these incredible clinics, let the world know in a comment.
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Or if you'd like to volunteer.
Or if you'd like to send them a donation (along with the replacement suggestion).