One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
Bolivia declares Israel ‘terrorist state’, scraps visa exemption agreement
Published time: July 30, 2014 21:58
Edited time: July 31, 2014 02:19
Bolivia has declared Israel to be a “terrorist state” and renounced a
visa exemption agreement with the country in protest over the ongoing
Israeli military offense in Gaza which already killed more than 1,300
dead and left over 7,000 wounded. LIVE UPDATES: Israel launches ground incursion in
Gaza Strip Canceling the 1972
agreement which allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia
“means, in other words, we are declaring (Israel) a terrorist
state,” the country's President Evo Morales
announced.
Morales explained that Operation Protective edge clearly shows
that “Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect
for life and the elementary precepts of rights that govern the
peaceful and harmonious coexistence of our international
community.” The announcement came after a cabinet meeting of the government
of Evo Morales which decided that; “The Bolivian state and people
have made a firm decision to terminate the agreement on visas to
Israel, from August 17, 1972, signed under a regime of
dictatorship in Bolivia and that allowed Israeli citizens to
enter Bolivia freely without even entry visa." Earlier in July, Morales filed a request with the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights to prosecute Israel for “crimes
against humanity.” Other Latin American countries including Chile and El Salvador
recalled their ambassadors in Israel on Tuesday for consultations
due to the increased violence in the Gaza Strip against
civilians. The move follows similar actions by Ecuador, Brazil
and Peru who have also recalled their ambassadors.
Bolivia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over a
previous military operation in Gaza.
Just on Wednesday morning shelling of a UN School in Gaza, left at least 20 dead. The incident
has brought worldwide condemnation.
READ MORE: 20 killed in Israeli UN school
shelling
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has condemned a
deadly attack by Israel against a UN school in the besieged Gaza
Strip.
"It is outrageous. It is unjustifiable. And it demands
accountability and justice," said the UN chief in Costa Rica
on Wednesday.
The IDF military campaign which began July 8, so far has left
more than 1,300 dead and over 7,000 wounded.
UNICEF: U.S. kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts
Posted by Caitlin Dewey and Max Fisher on April 18, 2013 at 11:48 am
Data source: UNICEF
American children are on average worse off than children in Western
Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic
states and the former Yugoslavia, according to a recent report from United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the welfare of children in developed countries.
The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures
well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety,
behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It
ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of
well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The United
States is joined at the bottom by “emerging” European economies, while
the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands come out on top. The
report notes that this latter group of countries tends to spend far more
per capita on social welfare programs.
The countries with the best reported child well-being tend to invest
in strong social safety nets. Norway, Iceland and Sweden sink nearly 7 percent of their GDP, according to an OECD report, into education. Countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which until the ‘90s had GDPs per capita
of less than $5,000, have been able to put less money into such
services. Though U.S. GDP per capita was more than $48,000 in 2012, that
money is not spread evenly cross the unusually large U.S. population.
As we noted earlier,
one of the report’s more alarming findings for the United States is the
degree to which income inequality has increased the population of
children who grow up in relative poverty, meaning that America’s
famously abundant wealth does not equally benefit all children.
Economists rate the U.S. economy as one of the most unequal in the
Western world.
The low U.S. rating, then, does not mean that all American children
are worse educated, less healthy and less well-off than all children in,
for example, Greece and Slovakia. After all, many American kids are
doing great. But the report, just as worryingly, means that significant
numbers of American children are so much worse off than the average
Greek or Slovakian child as to bring the overall U.S. average beneath
those other, relatively less wealthy and developed countries.
Here’s a chart showing the rankings, overall and across the five key metrics, for all 29 countries:
Data: UNICEF
Still, the United States did do well on some comparative metrics.
American kids get more exercise than almost any others studied in the
report, but they’re still, by far, the most overweight. (Chalk that up
to American calorie consumption,
which is also one of the world’s highest.) American kids also are the
least likely to drink alcohol — a finding that matches long-standing alcohol consumption patterns
of American adults. According to the World Health Organization,
Americans ages 15 and up have consumed far less alcohol than their
counterparts abroad for decades.
Meanwhile, Canadian children smoke the most marijuana, with more than
one in four reporting they’d lit up in the past year — a period when
Canada continued its national debate on the country’s cannabis laws.
Here’s something that might surprise you: kids in high-achieving
Finland attend preschool less than anyone else, which seems to buck
research linking preschool to later educational and economic success.
But, as the report explains, that statistic is somewhat misleading:
preschool begins later in Finland than it does elsewhere, which throws
off the numbers.
Finally, there are some interesting, if unpleasant, hints on how
Europe’s recent economic crises could impact youth there. In Spain,
Italy and Ireland, more than 10 percent of children ages 15 to 19 are
not enrolled in education, employment or training — a frightening figure
that might reflect post-recession unemployment numbers and which could,
per UNICEF, augur “mental health problems, drug abuse, involvement in
crime, and long-term unemployment and welfare dependence” in the future.
Some of those effects could be playing out in Spain already. More
than half of the surveyed Spanish children said they’d been in a
physical fight within the past year, a huge 15 percent jump from
UNICEF’s 2001 survey. Greece reported a similar jump in the past decade.
Both countries have suffered in the European financial crisis.
As the report notes, these types of statistics are interesting less as a snapshot of the present than a predictor of the future.
“At the heart of the case to be made is the fact that childhood is … a
time in which future patterns and pathways of health and well-being are
being laid down and in which disruption can have lifelong
consequences,” the report concludes. “Protecting the years of childhood
is therefore essential both for the well-being of those who are children
today and for the well-being of the societies of tomorrow.”
Just days after a leading genetically modified organism (GMO) researcher spoke out against GMOs and how many pro-GMO ‘scientists’ are in bed with Monsanto or carry their own GMO patents, the largest managed healthcare provider in the United States is now publicly speaking out against GMOs.
In a recent newsletter, the Kaiser Permanente company discussed the
numerous dangers of GMOs in a recent newsletter and how to avoid them.
Explaining how GM ingredients have been linked to tumors and organ
damage in rats in the only lifelong rat study available, the newsletter
highlighted how the only real long- term research indicates that GMOs are a serious health danger. The newsletter, which you can view here, states:
“Despite what the biotech industry might say, there is
little research on the long-term effects of GMOs on human health.
Independent research has found several varieties of GMO corn caused
organ damage in rats. Other studies have found that GMOs may lead to an
inability in animals to reproduce.”
Top Health Giant Says Buy Organic for Proper Health
The newsletter then goes on to tell readers how they can avoid GMOs
in their food through buying high quality organic and looking for other
non-GMO indicators. It is important to remember the organic labeling
meanings when shopping organic, however, which this newsletter
unfortunately does not address. Make sure you know which ‘level’ of
organic you are consuming:
Products labeled ‘100% organic’ – These items are
made with 100% organic ingredients and are the highest quality organic
products you can purchase. No GMOs are allowed.
Labeled ‘organic’ — These products are to contain at least 95% organic ingredients overall. Still no GMOs are allowed.
‘Made with ‘organic ingredients’ — This is the
lowest form of organic content. This label is only required to contain
70% organic ingredients, meaning that the remaining 30% can be
conventional. The conventional items, however, are not allowed to
contain GMOs. These products don’t qualify for the USDA seal, whereas
the previous two do.
You can also look for the ‘Non-GMO Verified’ logo on food items to be sure that they are GMO free. But why does a major corporation care that you are eating GMOs? Well
the fact of the matter is that the research (and common sense — eating
pesticide factories mixed with the DNA of viruses isn’t going to end
well) indicates GMOs are causing problematic health conditions across
the board. Of course the issue lies in the fact that GMOs are not
immediately considered as a cause and actually influence disease through
a series of complications that are not easy to trace. But as the only
lifelong study has showed us, 50% of male and 70% of female rats died prematurely when consuming GMOs.
And the bottom line is that this is costing Kaiser Permanente. If
members of the healthcare juggernaut were to switch to high quality
organic foods free of GMOs, pesticides, mercury-containing
high-fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners, then Kaiser would
be dishing out millions upon millions less for healthcare costs. More and more organizations and individuals alike are speaking out
against GMOs and the effects of GMO consumption as the evidence becomes
more and more clear on a daily basis. Perhaps next time Monsanto tries
to push a new outlandish creation into the food supply they will be met
with crushing opposition thanks to a global increase in awareness.
About Anthony Gucciardi: : Google Plus Profile
Anthony is an accomplished investigative journalist whose articles have
appeared on top news sites and have been read by millions worldwide.
Anthony's articles have been featured on top health & political
websites read by millions worldwide such as Reuters, Yahoo News, MSNBC,
and Bloomberg. Anthony is also a founding member of Natural Attitude, a leading developer of super high quality spagyric formulations. .
Progressive Radio Network presents A Gary Null Production WAR ON HEALTH: The FDA's Cult of Tyranny Introduced by the director (from his speech at the world premiere in New York City, June 15, 2012)
In
the near future, American medical practice may change dramatically for
the worse. No longer will maximal dose natural supplements—vitamins,
natural compounds, and scientifically proven medicinal herbs—be
available over the counter in local health and grocery stores. Holistic
practice, which relies upon non-prescription natural treatments instead
of Big Pharma drugs prescribed life-long, will diminish. American
healthcare will be imprisoned, patients will be forced to abide by a
single medical paradigm defined by corporate drug and food executives
and dictated by a government enforcement agency, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). This is the bleak scenario if the FDA succeeds in
limiting Americans' options to prevent and treat diseases.
'War
on Health' is the first documentary detailing and challenging the FDA
agenda and its allegiance with the international Codex Alimentarius,
which hopes to establish a monolithic food and health regime. Betraying
its founding mandate to assure drug, food and chemical safety in the
interests of public health, the FDA today is a repressive bureaucracy
serving pharmaceutical and agricultural greed and profits. Vaccines,
medical devices, prescription drugs are fast tracked at alarming rates
through the FDA at the expense of scientific oversight to assure their
efficacy and safety. The result is hundreds of thousands premature
deaths annually from pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines and medical devices
and an epidemic of medical incompetence and fraud sanctioned by federal
health officials.
Featuring many pioneering American and European
attorneys, physicians, medical researchers and advocates of health
freedom, War on Health lifts the veil on FDA's militaristic operations
against organic food providers and alternative physicians. The film's
conclusion is perfectly clear: the FDA is a tyrannical cult founded upon
the denial of sound medical science with little intention to improve
the nation's health and prevent disease.
Written and Directed by Gary Null Produced by Valerie Van Cleve Associate Producer: Richard Gale Editor: Richie Williamson Offline Editing: Valerie Van Cleve, L.A. Jones Camera Operators: Marcello Coppuchino, Peter Bonilla, David Grier, L.A. Jones Gregory Jason Russ, Jake Hammer Mesmire, Edson Tanakae, Valerie Van Cleve, Richie Williamson
Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership
(TPP), which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative
Ron Kirk. Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not
Congress or the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade
subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted
to see the text or to know the content.
The TPP has been called a “one-percenter” power tool. The agreement
essentially abolishes the accountability of foreign corporations to
governments of countries with which they trade. Indeed, the agreement
makes governments accountable to corporations for costs imposed by
regulations, including health, safety and environmental regulations. The
agreement gives corporations the right to make governments pay them for
the cost of complying with the regulations of government. One wonders
how long environmental, labor, and financial regulation can survive when
the costs of compliance are imposed on the taxpayers of countries and
not on the economic activity that results in spillover effects such as
pollution.
Many will interpret the TPP as another big step toward the
establishment of global government in the New World Order. However,
what the TPP actually does is to remove corporations or the spillover
effects of their activities from the reach of government. As the TPP
does not transfer to corporations the power to govern countries, it is
difficult to see how it leads to global government. The real result is
global privilege of the corporate class as a class immune to government
regulation.
One of the provisions allows corporations to avoid the courts and
laws of countries by creating a private tribunal that corporations can
use to sue governments for the costs of complying with regulation.
Essentially, the laws of countries that apply to corporations are
supplanted by decisions of a private tribunal of corporate lawyers.
The TPP is open to all countries. Currently, it is being negotiated
between the US, Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam,
Chile, and Peru. Australia, according to reports, has refused to submit
to the private tribunal system.
What are we to make of the TPP? It is perhaps too early to have all
the answers. However, I can offer some ways of thinking about it.
I doubt that the TPP is a New World Order takeover. If anything, the
TPP reduces the scope of global government by exempting corporations
from government control. Also, global government, unless it is
government by the American Empire, is inconsistent with the
neoconservatives insistence on US hegemony over the world. Powerful US
ideological, private, and government interest groups have no intention
of losing the power that they have acquired by being rolled into some
New World Order unless the New World Order is a euphemism for American
Empire.
In the criticisms of the TPP, much emphasis is placed on the costs
that corporations of foreign members of the agreement can impose on the
US. However, US corporations gain the same privileges over those
countries, as the agreement gives every country’s corporations immunity
to the other countries’ laws.
It could be the case that US corporations believe that their
penetration of the other countries will greatly exceed the activities in
the US of Brunei, New Zealand, Peru, et al. However, once Japan,
Canada, China and others join TPP, the prospect of American firms
getting more out of the agreement than foreign firms disappears, unless
from the US perspective the definition of foreign firm includes US
corporations that offshore the production of the goods and services that
they market in the US. If this is the case, then US offshoring firms
would be exempt not only from the laws and courts of foreign countries,
but also exempt from the laws and courts of the US.
This point is possibly moot as the agreement requires all governments
that are parties to the TPP to harmonize their laws so that the new
corporate privileges are equally reflected in every country. To avoid
discriminatory law against a country’s own corporations that do not
engage in foreign trade, harmonization could mean that domestic
corporations would be granted the same privileges as foreign investors.
If not, domestic firms might acquire the privileges by setting up a
foreign subsidiary consisting of an office.
As the TPP is clearly an agreement being pushed by US corporations,
the implication is that US corporations see it as being to their
relative advantage. However, it is unclear what this advantage is.
Alternatively, TPP is a strategy for securing exemption from regulation under the guise of being a trade agreement.
Another explanation, judging from the unusual collection of the
initial parties to the agreement, is that the agreement is part of
Washington’s strategy of encircling China with military bases, as the US
has done to Russia. One would have thought that an agreement of such
path-breaking nature would have begun with Japan, S. Korea, and
Philippines. However, these countries are already part of China’s
encirclement. Brunei, Singapore, New Zealand, and especially Vietnam
would be valuable additions. Are the special privileges that Washington
is offering these countries part of the bribe to become de facto
outposts of American Empire?
Yet another explanation is that Ron Kirk is caught up in the
deregulatory mindset that began with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and
financial deregulation. If financial markets know best and are
self-regulating, requiring no government interference, then so also are
other markets and businesses.
Free market economists view regulations as “takings.” The argument is
that regulations take corporate property–profits, for example, by
making corporations comply with health, safety, and environmental
regulation–just as government takes private property when it builds or
widens a road. Therefore, corporations should be compensated for
takings that result from regulation. As the argument goes, if government
wants corporations to protect the environment, the government should
pay the corporations for the cost of doing so. This argument gets rid of
“external costs” or “social costs”–costs that corporations impose on
others and future generations by the pollution and exhaustion of natural
resources, for example. The argument turns social costs into
compensation for takings.
The TPP is likely serving many agendas. As we learn more, the
motives behind the TPP will become clearer. From my perspective as an
economist and former member of government, the problem with Ron Kirk’s
TPP is that the agreement is constructed to serve private, not public
interests. Kirk is a public official charged with serving and
protecting the public interest. Yet, he has conspired in secret with
private interests to produce a document that exempts private
corporations from public accountability.
There is a paradox here. While financial corporations and now all
corporations are being made independent of government, US citizens have
lost the protection of law and are now subject to being detained
indefinitely or murdered without due process of law. Corporations gain
an unimaginable freedom while citizens lose all freedom and the rights
that define their freedom. Similarly, foreign countries, which as
members of TPP can be exempt from US law, are subject to “pre-emptive”
US violation of their air space and borders by drones and troops sent in
to assassinate some suspected terrorist, but which also kill citizens
of those countries who are merely going about their normal business.
Perhaps one way to understand TPP is that the US government is now
extending its own right to be lawless to corporations. Just as the US
government today is only answerable to itself, the TPP makes
corporations answerable only to themselves.
Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.
It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.
Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.
I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.
These events are Kafkaesque in themselves, but they are ever more so when one considers that these extraordinary violations of the US Constitution fail to be overturned in the Supreme Court. Apparently, American citizens lack standing to defend their civil liberties.
Yet, ObamaCare is before the US Supreme Court. The conservative majority might now utilize the “judicial activism” for which conservatives have criticized liberals. Hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. However, the fight over ObamaCare is not worth five cents.
It is extraordinary that “liberals,” “progressives,” “Democrats,” whatever they are, are defending a “health program” that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care.
Americans have been brainwashed that “a single-payer system is unaffordable” because it is “socialized medicine.” Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care.
The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care.
On top of these profits come the costs of preventing and combatting fraud. Because private insurance companies resist paying and Medicare pays a small fraction of the medical charges, private health care providers charge as much as they possibly can, knowing that the payments will be cut to the bone. But a billing mistake of even $300 can bankrupt a health care provider from legal expenses defending him/her self from fraud accusations.
The beauty of a single-payer system is that it takes the profits out of the system. No one has to make profits. Wall Street cannot threaten insurance companies and private health care companies with being taken over because their profits are too low. No health-provider in a single-payer system has to worry about being displaced in a takeover organized by Wall Street because the profits are too low.
Because a single-payer system eliminates the profits that drive up the costs, Wall Street, Insurance companies, and “free market economists” hate a “socialized” medical care system. They prefer a socialized “private” health care system in which public monies flow into private insurance companies.
To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the “socialistic” ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide “private” health care to US citizens who cannot afford it.
The extremely high costs of ObamaCare is not “socialistic medicine.” ObamaCare is high-cost privatized medicine that guarantees billions of dollars in profits to private insurance companies.
It remains to be seen whether such a ridiculous health care scheme, nowhere extant on earth except in Romney’s Massachusetts, will provide health care or just private profits.
People line up in the early morning at Wise County Fairgrounds in Virginia, the site of a makeshift field hospital providing free care for those in need. (Photo: Becky Lettenberger / NPR)
Blogger’s Note: This story was originally published on the National Public Radio (NPR) site, where you can elect to listen to the “All Things Considered” broadcast.I first picked up on it thanks to truthout, a free* daily news service replete with articles you’d like to read but don’t often find in the so-called Mainstream Media.
*Truthout is available for free by e-mail subscription, although it actually survives on the donations of a few percent of its subscribers.
Rural Medical Camp Tackles Health Care Gaps
by Howard Berkes
July 27, 2009
It was a Third World scene with an American setting. Hundreds of tired and desperate people crowded around an aid worker with a bullhorn, straining to hear the instructions and worried they might be left out.
Some had arrived at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Wise, Virginia, two days before. They slept in cars, tents and the beds of pickup trucks, hoping to be among the first in line when the gate opened Friday before dawn. They drove in from 16 states, anxious to relieve pain, diagnose aches and see and hear better.
"I came here because of health care - being able to get things that we can't afford to have ordinarily," explained 52-year-old Otis Reece of Gate City, Va., as he waited in a wheelchair beside his red F-150 pickup. "Being on a fixed income, this is a fantastic situation to have things done we ordinarily would put off."
For the past 10 years, during late weekends in July, the fairgrounds in Wise have been transformed into a mobile and makeshift field hospital providing free care for those in need. Sanitized horse stalls become draped examination rooms. A poultry barn is fixed with optometry equipment. And a vast, open-air pavilion is crammed with dozens of portable dental chairs and lamps.
A converted 18-wheeler with a mobile X-ray room makes chest X-rays possible. Technicians grind hundreds of lenses for new eyeglasses in two massive trailers. At a concession stand, dentures are molded and sculpted.
Desperate for Health Care
The 2009 Remote Area Medical (RAM) Expedition comes to the Virginia Appalachian mountains as Congress and President Obama wrestle with a health care overhaul. The event graphically illustrates gaps in the existing health care system.
"We're willing to sleep in pickup trucks or cars and deal with the elements to at least get some kind of health care," Reece adds. He earned a six-figure income working for an international industrial supply firm until an accident five years ago left him disabled. Joining him for dental, vision and medical checks are his wife, daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren.
"Tomorrow, I'm going to see the doctor to get my ear and my nose fixed!" grandson Jacob shouts excitedly. His nose appears battered and his ear has an oozing scab.
Before the gate opened, Loretta Miller, 41, of Honaker, Va., got four hours' sleep behind the wheel of her parked minivan. She was No. 39 in line for her eighth RAM expedition. Her visit last year saved her life.
"They done an ultrasound and told me that my gallbladder was enlarged and was ready to burst and it could kill me," Miller recalls. "They told me if I hadn't got help when I did, literally I could have died."
Medical, dental and vision help is often elusive for the 2,700 people seeking treatment during the three-day RAM event. Just over half of the people attending this year have no insurance at all, according to a survey of the patients conducted by RAM. Forty-seven percent could be considered underinsured, given unaffordable copays or gaps in coverage provided by Medicare, Medicaid and conventional insurance plans. Only 11 patients have dental insurance, and just seven have vision coverage.
"There's no doubt about it. There is a Third World right here in the United States," concludes Stan Brock, RAM's founder. Brock has organized similar medical expeditions in Asia, Africa and South America. "Here in the world's richest country, you have this vast number of people, some say 47 million, 49 million, that don't have access to the system and that's why [this] is necessary."
About 1,800 volunteers provide the medical, dental and logistical help, including hundreds of doctors, dentists, nurses, assistants and technicians.
Almost 4,000 Teeth
Miller is ecstatic when her number is called. The divorced hairdresser and mother of two is uninsured and in pain. But she had taken the time, even with little sleep, to put on makeup, braid her blond hair and dress in a white lace tunic. She walked briskly through the gate for what would turn out to be five hours in dental chairs, given the extraction of an abscessed tooth, three fillings and a root canal.
More than half of those seeking help sign up for dental exams and procedures. They fill the more than 70 dental chairs while hundreds wait their turn under tents nearby. Hundreds more out in the grassy parking lot hope they'll get their teeth cleaned and fixed before the event ends.
Dental health greatly affects general health, says Dr. Terry Dickinson, who directs the Virginia Dental Association and the RAM dental effort at the Wise fairgrounds.
"The infection in the mouth certainly has been shown to have an effect on systemic diseases," Dickinson explains. "So it's really critical that these folks be able to get infected teeth out and infection treated in the mouth because it's going to help them with their overall health."
The extent of infections is staggering. Dickinson and his team pull 3,857 teeth in 30 hours of work spread over 2 1/2 days. Some patients lose all their teeth. A 4-year-old had cavities filled in every tooth.
Who Is Responsible for Health Care?
Terrible teeth, obesity, smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes are common among the people seeking help here. That raises an important question. Are they at fault for their poor health?
"There's enough blame to go around for everybody. I think patients certainly have to have personal responsibility for what they're putting in their mouth, but we are also trying to create a better access care system. How are you going to get providers, whether it be dentists or physicians or anybody else, into these areas where economically these communities are struggling?" Dickinson asks.
That's a reference to the costs of medical and dental schools and the debts that graduates incur, which can be $100,000 and more. There's pressure to practice in more lucrative places beyond rural regions like Appalachia.
"There are areas of the country, and certainly Wise County is one of them, where there just aren't [enough] physicians," says Dr. Susan Kirk, an endocrinologist and diabetes specialist with the University of Virginia Health System, which provides specialists for the Wise RAM event. "We provide indigent care at the University of Virginia, but that's six hours away."
RAM founder Stan Brock is impatient with those who suggest the people seeking help in Wise are somehow at fault and unworthy of care given poor health habits.
"The rest of the population is not exactly in the best of shape themselves," Brock asserts. "They're eating well and, therefore, they're putting on weight and, therefore, they've got heart disease and the rate of diabetes in this country is going up. But, in the case of the well-to-do and the well-insured, they can afford to take care of it."
At the end of her long day with dentists, Loretta Miller was still numb with Novocain but grateful for the care she could not otherwise afford.
"It's well worth the drive and the wait," Miller said, close to 12 hours after her number was called. "You get tired and stuff. But you think about all the trips and the money it would have cost to have all this done. I couldn't have had it done."
She then laughs about standing in line again at 5 a.m. the next day so she can get eyeglasses to "see what they've done."
RAM organizers say they spent about $250,000 providing care worth about $1.5 million. In 10 years in southwest Virginia, they say, they've treated more than 25,000 people. They have eight more expeditions planned this year, from Virginia to California.
By the Numbers
A survey of RAM attendees by the event's organizers provides some insight into who is left out of conventional medical, dental and vision care.
What: Health care providers saw 2,715 patients and performed 2,671 medical exams, 1,088 eye tests and 1,850 dental exams. They extracted 3,857 teeth and put in 1,628 fillings.
Who: Patients came from 16 different states; 30 percent were repeat patients.
Of the patients, 51 percent are uninsured, 40.3 percent are on Medicaid or Medicare, and just 7.3 percent have employer or private insurance. Fewer than 1 percent of patients have dental or vision insurance.
Twenty-six percent of the people are employed, 40.6 are unemployed, 4.7 percent are retired and 4.8 percent are children.
Cost: The organizers paid about $250,000 out of pocket to run the event, and they provided an estimated $1.5 million worth of care.
