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How do The Candidates' Plans Affect Ordinary Folks? -- Columbia Journalism Review E-mail to friends
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Trudy Lieberman, March 25 2008
 
Not long ago I met Charles, a fifty-four-year-old man living in a poor Cleveland neighborhood. He had run out of his blood pressure pills and he had no money to buy more. His arm was tingling and his vision blurry. He was dizzy, he said. Charles had come to a makeshift clinic set up in an old Catholic school, run by a woman who partners with student nurses to offer preventive care to people who receive almost none. The nurses said his blood pressure had hit the danger zone and they called EMS. Charles refused to go to the hospital. He kept asking me: “Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to pay?” Rose Marie Egensperger who runs the clinic on a shoestring, explained: “Folks have lived with symptoms so long their health isn’t their first thought. For 90 percent of the people the major concerns are money and how am I going to get home.” This time Charles lucked out—he got new pills from another clinic he had been to before. Who knows what will happen when he runs out again?

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Rich & Poor Gap evident in Health Care
Written by Christine A. on 03-28-2008 15:09
I work in administration at a federally qualifid health center. For those American's who do not believe that there is an enlarging gap between the rich and poor essentially eliminating the middle class, just read articles like this or come to my employer and ride the elevator. Get out of your comfortable world and talk to people like Charles. The vast majority of individuals with financial stability are well able to obtain quality health care and address there needs. The poor must rely on clinics, charity or go without. So much for the American Dream. If we can not provide the basic necessities for our citizens were are we as a nation.
  

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