NYT: “Can We Really Afford to Let Health Care Get Any Worse?”

New York Times reporting captures what happens when millions of Americans must rely on volunteer health care clinics to survive.

Nicholas Kristof and Lynsey Addario’s recent New York Times opinion piece, “Can We Really Afford to Let Health Care Get Any Worse?”, is a clear-eyed account of what happens when a nation normalizes medical debt and unaffordable care – and when politicians view the resultant human suffering as acceptable collateral damage.

At the center of Kristof’s reporting and Addario’s photography is Remote Area Medical (RAM), the nonprofit that provides free health care to Americans who have nowhere else to turn. Kristof and Addario document what always happens when RAM sets up a pop-up clinic: lines forming long before dawn, people sleeping in their cars and trucks to increase the odds that they can get into the clinic to see a doctor or dentist for the first time in years.

For me, this story is painfully familiar.

Nearly two decades ago, I first stumbled upon a RAM clinic while visiting my parents in Tennessee, where RAM is based. I borrowed my dad’s old Oldsmobile and drove to the Wise County fairgrounds in southwest Virginia and witnessed a scene that I could hardly believe was in the United States of America: people I could have grown up with waiting in the rain to be treated in barns and animal stalls that doctors and nurses were using as makeshift examining rooms. I learned later that many of those folks had health insurance. But what they didn’t have was the ability to pay the deductibles and copays their insurers demanded upfront. They had insurance cards in their wallets that were, for all practical purposes, worthless. They were among the growing number of Americans who are what Forbes magazine called “functionally uninsured.”

In 2018, my colleague Joey Rettino and I went back to that same Wise County clinic, which was held for years over a long weekend in July. We brought a camera and recorded what became one of the last interviews with Stan Brock, RAM’s founder, just months before his death. Brock — a former television host who once worked as a cowboy in some of the most remote parts of South America — devoted the final chapter of his life to a simple, radical belief: No one should go without care because they can’t afford it. His legacy lives on in every RAM clinic, whether in Appalachia, Ohio or Philadelphia where I now live.

When free, volunteer-run clinics are a lifeline for both insured and uninsured Americans, something is deeply broken. And as Kristof and Addario’s reporting and photographs document, America’s health care crisis is poised to get worse.

Their work is a reminder that kindness and volunteerism, however extraordinary, are not a health care system. They are a stopgap and a moral and economic alarm bell.

Stan Brock said many times that RAM should not have to exist in a country as wealthy as the U.S. His dream was that the organization he founded would no longer be needed here so that his team could go back to its original mission of flying doctors and other health care professionals to the world’s most remote places. Sadly, that won’t happen anytime soon.