Please read the story on Huff Post about the lady who is foregoing treatments to stop her from going blind so that the money can be spent ensuring that her daughters can see, it is a family defect, the family has already lost their home over medical expenses.

Mr Benen, it might be a good idea to also work in other Conservative voices on this subject. I'm thinking of some Repubs elected to office who've basically heard heart-rending things from constituents only to say something like "ask your neighbors for help" and the like. They don't like like a normal person should think, you know. They literally have no compassion nor empathy. As long as they're set, they do not care that so many millions of Americans are not.

(Hence my disgust with Dems for being so willing to negotiate away the farm in exchange for "bipartisanship.")

It's like denying the Holocaust. Each of these buzz-headed bozos who are screaming about death camps and long lines either don't know that they already exist and are being run by "health care providers" (oxymoron if ever there was one), or they are just plain stupid people. I think they were called "low information voters" in the last election cycle. Yeah, you know the onesthinking that since Palin could see Russia from Alaska meant one owned an abbundance of foreign policy knowledge. Nauseating...

isn't it quite profound, across the political spectrum, to see the (boring, trivial) contradictions of american capitalism playing out in the glaring light of the suffering and death of american citizens, as all the politicians ignore the growing horror...

and

to see the various sociopath responses that are also, pretty much across the political spectrum -- given the national disaster essence of health care in this country.

usa! usa! usa!11!!1 whatta country!

But this is what conservative mean when they talk about 'charity', 'helping others' and 'non-governmental programs'. You see, all those people got care within our present system. Never mind that there is no way to know when the next free-clinic will come by. Never mind that they left diseaes and injuries go untreated for weeks or even months. They got some treatment so we still have the best system in the world.

So no problems here. Move along, pay no attention to those cancer patients dying on the sidewalk. Don't look at the people with chronic health problems being turned away because there are enough doctors or time or equipment to help them.

And yes I'm one of those people who sometimes wonder just what country I'm living in when those images of thousands of people lined up for emergency care outside of tents.

You guys just don't get it. Here is the whole thing in a nutshell:

God is just. Therefore those who can't afford to see a doctor must have done something to deserve their poverty. So it would go against God's will to force anyone who can afford it to contribute to helping these sinners to get something they haven't earned. Likewise unemployment benefits, Social Security, etc. If God decides to f--- someone over, who are you to interfere? And if someone dies because they couldn't afford a doctor, then they should have prayed harder.

Being poor is the most serious crime there is, and must be punished. Got it now?

Ther report I read over the weekend is such irony. It says if healthcare reform passes there will be a great shift of money from blue states to red states, because those are the people who are suffering without healthcare. These are the people that are fooled by the reps in the government into doing everything that is bad for them.It is a sorry state of affairs and show perhaps the education level in these southern states is pretty low.

60 minutes did a story on this phenomenon (the big health care clinic in a field by doctors who normally do this in 3rd world countries).

IMHO, someone should sit EVERYONE in congress in a room, lock the door and force them to watch the footage.

The end.

America is a worker's paradise.

I'm pretty sure you meant "expositon", not "expedition."

I would LOVE to know how many of the people receiving care in Houston voted Republican in the last several cycles. No doubt a high percentage. On some level they deserve the outcomes they get becuase of who they support, not that they put those two things together...

The doctor mentioned was on Morning Joe this AM-without the Joe, thankfully- and had videos. Katrina revisited, indeed.

Why Houston, Mika asked?

Because Texas has the lowest rate of uninsured in the country.

The thousands that lined up had no insurance, were embarrased to be there- and were EMPLOYED! (Texas emplyers traditionally do not provide health coverage)

What was interesting, from a political point of view began when when Lefty Mommy Mika observed that an overwhelming number of the people were obese.

The doctor said, yes, and that's a big cause of our health costs, and is preventable. And we all pay for it.

"Not so fast," said Curmudgeon(AKA Let Them Eat Cake) Buchanan. "It's not my problem if they eat too much; can't have the government, nanny state, etc etc"

It was a play in one act, contrasting the Left and Right approach to health care, with the good doctor as Greek chorus. . .

My simple question is: What keeps this from being on every news program, the subject of every call/email/fax to Congress, letters to the insurance companies that enable this practice? I admit, I have not done so, so I am as much to blame as those I criticize. Can we start here and now? As verecia on other threads has done, call your rep and let the staffer who answers know that they are as complicit in this crime as their employers. If they do not storm their boss's office and present them with the outrage they are hearing from callers, they are also responsible for the anti health reform movement. Reminds me of the stories in the New Testament of Jesus healing the multitudes, who lined up to receive his healing touch or words. We are the second coming of Christ and it is up to us to be the healers. We can no longer depend on the Pharisees to do our bidding. We are the ones we have been waiting for. The wait is over. Now is the time and we are the Ones.

I am committed to Oneness through Justice and Transformation
peace,
st john

emjayay: no, they call it an expedition. The person who started this, Stan Brock, co-star of Wild Kingdom, was inspired by his own work in the Amazon with indiginous people who lived many miles from the nearest doctors, in Remote Areas, therefor the name. He set up expeditions to these areas and called his organization RAM: Remote Area Medical. Go to: ramusa.org for the full story.

Why were there no major networks - where is the footage of this?

The sad thing is, you could take all the Republicans in Congress to witness the free clinic in person, and it wouldn't shake their callous belief system.

Republicans don't care about health care for average working people.

If any worker dies due to lack of health care access, there are plenty of other workers who will be there to take his/her place.

Republicans have only ever been about cheap labor. Even though HCR will by most accounts actually help to reduce labor costs (by shifting health care insurance away from employers as a burden cost), the overriding issue is loss of billions of revenue from the current system, which is itself part of and tied to corporations.

Mike S: Are you kidding? Why would the "major networks" expose their imbalance and bias to the world? Are you saying it did not happen because you did not see it on your teevee? The reason you come to this site is to learn the truth. If not for that reason, you are in the wrong place. I don't always agree with Steve or many of the commenters here, but I am encouraged to see the ones who uncover the ignorance of the many. The information is easily available, if you are willing to suspend your judgment of how you think it is, and look for other points of view that expose the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. There are many is the U.S.A. who are suffering. Many of them are in that position because they have bought the status quo line from the "major networks". Watch a couple of hours of your favorite major network's programming and tell me what the message is. "You are not enough the way your are. Buy our stuff and you, too, will be part of the better class."

I am committed to Oneness through Justice and Transformation
peace,
st john

Re: Virginia Foxx

She would cite the free clinic as an example of how everyone gets health care.

Why were there no major networks - where is the footage of this?
Posted by: Mike S on September 28, 2009 at 3:42 PM |

***********************************************

All the dancing monkey's (the Corporate Media) with their bell hop hats on, tethered to organ whose music is being played by the Corporations that own and train them, were too busy saying as loudly and often as they could: 'the public option is dead'.

"I would LOVE to know how many of the people receiving care in Houston voted Republican in the last several cycles. No doubt a high percentage."

And many of the people bussed in by Dick Army to disrupt townhall meetings looked the very type who would most benefit from a reformed healthcare system. I don't get it.

This should be on every major news show non-stop. Instead we get 24 hour coverage of "You lie!"

This peice mentioned working people without health insurance being ashamed to show up for these health events. I think says alot. People who lose everything because of a health issue, people who must turn to these event..it's almost like there's an imposed stigma to silence them. Catastrophe happens and you vanish. There are no faces to the stories. Its a concept not a reality.

I'm still waiting for a jackass like Mike K or am to show up and tell us how all of these people are full of crap and could afford a policy if they just looked hard enough.

Funny how they ignore blindingly obvious examples of the failures of the existing system like this...

Thank you for posting this. It is critically important that Americans see the consequences of not having easy access to primary care. I gave a speech on health care reform approximately 2 months ago (I'm a surgeon) and I tried to drive home the point that it is the middle class that is most at risk. What do you do when your insurance premiums double or triple? I always try to drive home that we were all just one catastrophic illness away from possibly being dropped by our insurance company. We are all susceptible to catastrophic illness -- being hit by a drunk driver, falling off a ladder, falling down stairs -- these can happen to anybody.

WE need healthcare reform (not just insurance reform) now!

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care." -- Wendell Potter

And that was in 2007. This year -- the Wise County "event" is once a year (your "annual physical", if you're into morbid sense of humour). This year, there were more people who waited longer and more people who got turned away, untreated.

On a parallel line of thought, there was an article in NYT recently about the drop in charitable giving. The *biggest* drop was -- you guessed it -- in healthcare. In arts the drop was smaller in religion there was no drop at all.

And that drop does make a great deal of difference. The doctors and nurses and helpers are all volunteers and don't charge a penny but the medications and the tents and everything else needs to be paid for. For an ever increasing number of people, as the economy keeps on tanking (don't tell me we're out of recession, until everyone who wants it can find a full time job, with benefits).

Which is why, when I hear bastards (and bitches) like Cantor, Grassley and Foxx utter smarmy platitudes about charity healthcare, I get so mad, I could tear their livers out, bare-handed.

Sorry for the rant but our totally screwed up healthcare "system" is something that's really, really, close to my heart.

Oh, and someone above asked about coverage... From the volunteers who were at the Wise County event, I gather that there were more *foreign* TV stations represented than national ones. Not only are we screwing things up, we're doing it in public, becoming the laughingstock of the entire civilised world. Pfui.

These people line up at these clinics to grandstand. They could go to doctors privately and with some dignity, but that wouldn't be flamboyant enough and there wouldn't be any cameras, would there?

Anything to make America look bad, right?

Healing the sick was a specific exhortation from Christ to the disciples (Matt. 10:1-8, Luke 10:9). I find it stunning that christians can justify giving tens of millions of dollars to organizations that work to take away the rights of gay families, but they can't bothered to obey their own god's specific command and do their part to help heal the sick. Instead, they treat the sick like criminals. This is a damn travesty.

There was *some national TV coverage on CBS. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBr6lEEifSk&feature=player_embedded

Also, to the person who wondered how many of these "patients" had voted Republican - my guess is less than half. Houston is like most other major urban centers - majority Democratic. My boss volunteered at this event, and many of the people who came had been laid off months ago and exhausted their COBRA benefits. Some could not afford COBRA, and some never had insurance to begin with because they are contract workers and can't afford the high premiums of individual policies, or their employers simply don't cover them. Sad times. The silver lining is that *now, now that the middle class is feeling the pain, something will be done.

Mike K - I hope that was snark. If not, this was a FREE clinic. You know any private docs offering free consultations? After being seen, the attendees were referred to free/low-cost clinics for follow-up care, of which there are a handful in the Houston metro area of 4+ million people. Most are quite small, with not nearly the capacity to handle a large influx of patients the next few weeks and months. Still, some treatment is better than none.

This is a damn travesty. - Keori @ 5:21

So True. There are organizations that take it seriously though, this is an example of just one of many faiths.

FC, @18:28,

That was Mlke K, not Mike K. Ie a parody of Mike K, who's a doctor but totally unlike your boss; he's in that 24% of doctors whose answer to the problem of the un- and under-insured is "Let them eat Advil!"

If Mike K is a "doctor", I very much doubt his voluntary adherence to all or part of the Hippocratic Oath. More like the Hypocritical Oath of Republicans and Conservatives. "Treat only those who can pay you or whose insurance companies pay the highest rates allowable."

One of the Republicans with whom I work asked of me--
Are these the people who cannot afford health care insurance,
or are they those who choose not to have insurance?
Nattering nabobs of negativity...these Republicans

The comment about the lack of empathy among the right wing rings very true. I've noticed it myself but sort of in the shadows. The comment brings it out into the light and allows it to be seen in all its "glory."

I truly believe that this characteristic of Republicans defines their whole world outlook. It's all about "me", and nothing about helping their neighbors, and especially not if their neighbors are the "others." You see it in the Kansas Republican woman who laughed at some woman who didn't have medical insurance for her child. You saw it in Cantor's response to a woman in a similar situation. You saw it in Bush's response to soldiers getting killed in Iraq. You saw it in Gov. Goodhair's response to children who would otherwise be eligible for government provided medical insurance. You see it again and again and again. It is one of the defining qualities of a psychopath, the total lack of empathy.

I work at one of the major health insurance companies, and the company's repeatedly stated position is that health care reform is essential. Sure, they're not interested in a public option, and will fight that with everything they have, but even in their internal communications, they are maintaining support for health care reform overall. If the health insurance industry is trying to kill all reform, why spend that much energy pretending to be in favor of it - even outside of public view?