Free Health Clinics

On Saturday the National Association of Free Health Clinics, a nonprofit organization, sponsored a free health clinic at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

More than 100 doctors and 400 volunteers from around the U.S. were on hand to staff two halls of the convention center that had been converted into 52 examination areas sectioned off by blue curtains.

By the end of the day, more than 1,000 people had been examined.

MSNBC producer Rich Stockwell was there to cover the event and this is what he wrote:

After watching for hours as the patients moved through the clinic, it was hard to believe that I was in America.

Eighty-three percent of the patients they see are employed, they are not accepting other government help on a large scale, not "welfare queens" as some would like to have us believe. They are tax-paying, good, upstanding citizens who are trying to make it and give their kids a better life just like you and me.

They are victims of a system built with corporate profits at its center, which long ago forgot the moral imperative that should drive us to show compassion to our fellow men and women.

Health reform is not about Democrats or Republicans or who can score political points for the next election, it's about people. It's about fairness and justice in a system that knows none. I'd defy even the most hardened capitalist-loving-conservative to do what I did on Saturday and continue to pretend that the system in place right now is working.

There are no words that can accurately describe the quiet desperation on the faces of the patients. Every single one I spoke to, and every one I heard talking with doctors, expressed their gratitude for the event and wished that they were held more often.

Over 700-thousand people in Louisiana alone have no health care, most of them with jobs that don't offer insurance. Or, worse, they have to decide whether to pay for that or food and housing. Four patients were taken out on stretchers and admitted immediately to hospitals.

I spoke with a nurse who was there not as a volunteer, but as a patient. He works two part time jobs at hospitals providing quality care to those who have the one thing he doesn't. Many of his patients share his condition of high blood pressure, but they are fortunate to have insurance to pay for him to care for them while he goes without. His situation is not uncommon, he has tried for years to get more hours at one of his jobs so he will be eligible for benefits, but it hasn't happened yet. Our system of for-profit health care can't afford to give him and others benefits- might make the stock price drop a penny or two.

Politicians continue to tell us we are the most compassionate and caring people, and clearly we have done much good in the world. I left the event overwhelmed by the hard work and dedication of the volunteers, doctors, nurses, other medical professionals, as well as ordinary citizens who came to help. I am left with one overwhelming question: what does it say about us as a nation of people who can live in a country so rich and yet allow this to continue?

From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33975919/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann

For more information on the amazing work done by the National Association of Free Health Clinics: http://www.freeclinics.us/