AMY GOODMAN: As debate continues in Washington over healthcare reform, thousands of Americans in neighboring Virginia are preparing to line up this weekend to receive free healthcare provided by a group called Remote Area Medical.
The charity was originally set up to provide doctors and medicine to isolated communities in the developing world, places like the Amazon jungle, where medical treatment is hard to come by. But the group quickly found itself having to set up in communities across the United States, where medical care is a right millions of Americans cannot afford.
Founded in 1985, Remote Area Medical is a non-profit, volunteer relief corps that provides healthcare free, dental care, eye care, veterinary services, and technical and educational assistance. It’s based in Knoxville, Tennessee, but the group frequently travels to set up relief centers, what’s called “expeditions,” across the country. This weekend they’ll be once again back in Wise County, Virginia.
Stan Brock is the founder of Remote Area Medical, joining us on the phone from Knoxville, Tennessee.
Stan, welcome to Democracy Now! Now, you are the Stan Brock of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, that show that was on Sunday nights for I don’t know how many years?
STAN BROCK: Yes, Sunday evenings, 7:00 p.m., as I recall, on NBC.
AMY GOODMAN: And what brought you from that, and what were you doing there, to founding Remote Area Medical?
STAN BROCK: Well, Remote Area Medical history goes back to many years when I lived in the Upper Amazon, and this is before Wild Kingdom. And I was living with a tribe of Native Americans called the Wapishana Indians, and we were—well, it was a very remote area on the northern border of Brazil in what used to be British Guiana. I had a nasty accident there with a wild horse. And while I was being pulled out from underneath the horse, one of the Wapishana said, “Well, the nearest doctor is twenty-six days on foot from here.”
It was about that time that I got the idea of bringing those doctors just a little bit closer. And that’s what we did many, many years later when I formed Remote Area Medical, but subsequently found that there were a lot of people like those Wapishanas here in the United States that didn’t have access to healthcare. And so, 64 percent of everything we do is now right here in America.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what, for example, you’re about to do this weekend, this expedition that you’ve got in Wise, Virginia. In fact, you’re about to start sending off supplies just after we speak.
STAN BROCK: Yeah. Well, it will be the 575th Remote Area Medical expedition. The 574th ended just last Sunday. And we see many, many hundreds and often thousands of people at these operations. In fact, last year at Wise, Virginia, we did 5,586 patient encounters, with 1,584 volunteers in just two-and-a-half days. And to give you some idea of the volume of medical work that goes on in one of these RAM expeditions, we pulled 3,896 bad teeth there last year, but we did save 1,888 teeth by filling them, so that was an improvement over the year before. But—
AMY GOODMAN: How important is dental for any health plan?
STAN BROCK: Well, that’s a very good question, because even though when you look at the figures at the end of the year, and we see more patients in general medical procedures and consultations, diabetes and heart disease and so on, the dental and vision care are two items that Americans just do not have access to when it comes to affordability in this country. And so, any plan that’s going to provide any type of universal healthcare or partial universal healthcare in this country must address the issue of dental treatment and vision treatment and eyeglasses for adults, because those are the two overriding factors that are bringing people to our clinics: intense pain, so they can’t function, or the inability to be able to read or drive a motorcar or operate machinery, for which they perhaps just simply need a pair of glasses.
