EDITORIAL
Lining Up for Help
Published: August 15, 2009

We’ve been so caught up in dissecting the technical arguments over health care reform that it is easy to lose sight of the human dimensions of the crisis.

That was impossible last week when we saw pictures of thousands of people waiting stoically outside an improvised clinic in Inglewood, Calif., near Los Angeles.


The LA Forum in Inglewood, California, hosted dental and medical examinations, for thousands of people thanks to the charity Remote Area Medical.



It looked as if it was happening in an underdeveloped country, where villagers might assemble days in advance for care from a visiting medical mission. But it was happening in a major American metropolitan area. This vast, palpable need for help is a shameful indictment of our health care system — one that politicians opposed to reform insist is the world’s best.

The operation was run by a group called Remote Area Medical, which was formed to deliver care to Indians living in remote areas of the Amazon basin. It soon found great need here. It started delivering free services in rural America, progressed to medium-sized cities, and last week set up a free clinic at The Forum in Inglewood, where the Lakers used to play basketball.

Teams of volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and other professionals, using donated supplies, delivered free care starting Tuesday. They saw roughly 1,000 patients on the first day alone, but still had to give hundreds of people numbers to return the next day. By Thursday, they had committed all slots for the eight-day event and announced that they could not take any more patients.

Those lucky to get in received dental care, vision tests and eyeglasses, mammograms, pap smears, tuberculosis tests and physical examinations that monitored the progress of such chronic diseases as cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma.

Judging from press reports, the people seeking help either had no insurance or inadequate insurance that required them to pay high deductibles and co-payments that they could not afford. Many had lost group coverage when laid off from a job and could not afford to buy their own policies on the open market. Some were denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Others had lost benefits when California’s Medicaid program was cut back, and many simply could not find easy access to medical care except in an emergency room.

The clinics are an inspiring example of what dedicated volunteers can do. But they are temporary events and come nowhere near to meeting the nation’s needs.

Health care reforms under consideration in Congress could make big strides toward filling the gaps: by offering less costly insurance on new exchanges; by expanding Medicaid to cover more poor people and reaching out more vigorously to enroll them; by subsidizing coverage for low-income people; by helping increase the supply of primary care doctors; by requiring insurers to offer essential benefits and preventing them from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

There was another powerful image last week: angry protesters at town hall meetings charging that government bureaucrats would ration their care, or worse. At times the rhetoric was disturbing, especially knowing how much disinformation is being spread to frighten Americans. But any project as ambitious and expensive as health care reform must be robustly debated.

Americans deserve to know all of the facts, including that tens of millions of their neighbors and friends have no health insurance coverage at all or insurance that is grossly inadequate. If they still have doubts about why reform is so necessary, they should take another look at those lines in Inglewood.