David Freddoso: These docs want to help - but will bureaucrats let them?
By: David Freddoso
Online Opinion Editor
October 22, 2009
Stan Brock just wants to help. The former co-star of "Wild Kingdom" wants to deliver free medical, dental and vision care to the poor. Whereas most politicians talk about "bending the cost curve" in health care, Brock simply wants to break it - to provide care free of charge, at the hands of unpaid volunteer doctors and dentists using donated equipment.
Brock's group, Remote Area Medical, wants to bring its services to Washington, and soon. He wants his volunteer eye doctors to grind new glasses on the spot for those having trouble seeing.
He wants his dentists to pull rotten teeth and perform root canals in badly neglected mouths. He wants to give checkups and HIV tests to the uninsured and the underinsured. No questions asked.
The only question is whether the bureaucrats will let him do it.
Consistent with its name, RAM began in Guyana to serve remote native peoples of the Amazon, for whom the nearest doctor was in some cases weeks away. But Brock, an Englishman, saw such intense demand in the United States that he started work here in 1992.
Today, he says, the group does about 65 percent of its work here, holding large weekend or even weeklong events for which thousands line up for hours awaiting free care.
RAM runs on a shoestring budget of about $300,000 and takes no government money. It concentrates its operations in Tennessee for one simple reason: It is the only state with a full-blown "open-borders" policy toward volunteer out-of-state doctors. The obstacles in many other jurisdictions are daunting for an organization that seeks to treat thousands of patients in a short period.
"We're treating people on a massive scale," Brock tells me. "When you can't bring in doctors from outside of the state, you just can't recruit enough locally to be able to handle that kind of volume."
RAM's August event in Los Angeles, for example, served 6,300 patients in eight days, but had to turn away thousands more for lack of available doctors. The event had just 30 dentists, leaving the majority of RAM's 100 dental chairs and sets of equipment unused.
California's government, drowning in red ink (in part because of health care costs for the poor), was nonetheless inflexible about letting in out-of-state doctors who wanted to work for free.
"We don't know how well someone may have been trained in Texas or Alaska or somewhere else," said Candis Cohen, spokeswoman for California's Board of Medicine, to the Los Angeles Times. "We have our own standards. They're quite high."
Of course, California doctors often train at the same medical schools as doctors in Texas, Alaska and elsewhere. And, as Brock likes to put it, out-of-state lawyers are easily admitted to other states' bars on a temporary basis, despite dramatic differences in state laws. The human kidney, however, is identical in every state.
Brock insists that, although his group is the only one of its kind in the United States today, dozens of others would materialize if state governments would only adopt more flexible policies. "You'd see groups like this popping up all over," he tells me.
It would not cost them a dime to do so. In fact, states would save money if RAM and similar groups were treating their indigent patients.
Despite the setback in California, Brock has high hopes for Washington, D.C. Already, the District's Board of Nursing has agreed to a "Tennesseelike" standard for nurses from out-of-state, by which they can simply bring copies of their licenses and begin working. But RAM still must also win over the District's boards of optometry, dentistry, and medicine.
Their decisions could determine whether RAM can extend a helping hand to Washington's poor.
David Freddoso is an editorial staff writer and can be reached at dfreddoso@washingtonexaminer.com.
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