Karen was a trauma nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans before the storm. The hospital, now closed, gave care to the uninsured. In this video I produced through the Cover America Tour, Karen raises the question: can low-income ex-New Orleanians with long term illnesses return to their city without this crutch and medical mainstay?

The following post first appeared on the Cover America Tour website, the Consumer Reports Health project I’m producing video for.

ELKHART, Indiana - The kids are on state-assisted medical benefits, and her husband’s fully covered through his job. Jessica, a 32-year-old stay-at-home mom, is the only one in this Elkhart, Indiana family of six who doesn’t have health insurance.

In recent years when Jessica came back from a doctor’s visit with a diagnosis of relatively minor ailments such as strep throat, her husband would make pencil drawings in their trailer home. He sketched fantasy scenes, populated with moons and star-gazers. By selling his art to supportive community members, the couple was able to offset a portion of medical costs.

But when Jessica was told last March that she needed gall-bladder surgery – immediately – she knew just being crafty would be a hard way of working off medical debt.

Initially, she was told the cost of her surgery alone would be $12,000. The family took the savings set aside in hopes of one day buying a home and put it towards the down payment for the surgeon. The family was cut a break when they got a bank loan and her bill was cut in half by sympathetic providers. They’re paying it all off in monthly installments, but Jessica says, it’s still a struggle to pay up to $300 a month when they have six mouths to feed.

Jessica says she’s looked into putting herself on her husband’s insurance, but the family wouldn’t be able to pay an additional $375 a month on one take-home income of $25,000/year. Nor could they afford, she says, giving up the 2-5% of their income that would go towards a state program designed for the uninsured.

Since her surgery, Jessica’s looking for supplemental income to knock back some of her medical debt. Meantime, she’s become crafty herself, weaving dream catchers from hemp twine and leather. It will be years before the family can pay off the costs of her surgery, and many more before they can begin to realize the classic American dream of owning their own home.

In one of the four florescent-lit exam rooms of the nation’s oldest free clinic, Sister Mary Ellen Howard told the Cover America Tour producers about a poll she gave the dozens of uninsured patients that shuffle through Cabrini medical facilities every month.

The poll asked them what they would do if they didn’t have Cabrini’s volunteer labor to care for their medical needs, from routine check-ups to getting their diabetes medicine. Half of them said they would go without care. Some said they would go to the emergency room. One patient wrote only “.38 Special,” the name of a bullet, what I can only guess meant they would die or kill themselves without the free care that Cabrini provides.

That’s pretty extreme.

Sister Mary Ellen told us about other extreme things, mainly about the changes they’ve noticed in their clientele recently. More people are calling the clinic to inquire about their services. Patients have been coming in showing more advanced stages of illness, and in the past few months, the head physician reported that her patients have been losing weight.

Considerable weight. Not just a few pounds, but 10, 20, 30 pounds. So the volunteer doctors have started asking not just “How are you feeling,” but “Are you eating enough?” and “Do you know where to get free food?”

One can only surmise that people are eating less because of the rising costs of food, of fuel, and of the troubled economy. But I felt flurries in my stomach when I saw this flyer (right) on the Cabrini Clinic walls.

The patients at the Cabrini Clinic are the working poor. They don’t have insurance at their jobs. Many of them don’t qualify for government health care for the poor because they have an income. I know people are pinching pennies. But we are at a whole new level when working people, in the United States, are suffering from lack of food.

That’s the question that Peter in Carbondale had to ask himself, within just a few hours of an accident he had chopping wood. The small businessman can’t afford health insurance, and knew that the life-flight needed to reattach his thumb would cost him in the tens of thousands. Watch his story:

Check out some of the other videos I’ve produced lately for the Cover America Tour, a project of Consumer Reports Health. I’ll post the best stories to this blog.

It’s been on the road less than two-weeks, but the vehicle you see in the background already has a couple nicknames. “Aqua Box” is my favorite, coined by my co-worker Meg’s five year-old nephew, Kyle. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the class “C” RV I’m living in until mid-September.

I’m the video producer for a Consumer Reports Health project, The Cover America Tour. Three of us are traveling around the lower 48 for three and a half months, interviewing average Americans about their experience with the health care system.

And as you can tell from the videos, the system of taking care is not getting raving reviews.

We’ve met uninsured seniors with diabetes who can’t afford medication, patients who have received amputations after receiving bad care, and moms who say they their Visa card is their only insurance.

I can’t complain about the journey. We’ve been staying at beautiful New England campsites, where I’ve been going on long sweaty bike rides and taking swims in huge fresh water ponds. So far we’ve been through the town with the second best hot-wings, and the birthplace of the author of the Wizard of Oz. Exciting, huh?

I named my terrabyte hard drive Moldenke, after the one-eyed character in the science fiction cult book, Motorman. So far I’ve been producing about a video a day from my production studio, a 1′x3′ space on the RV kitchen table. I gotta reach 100 by the end of the trip, no small feat when you have to edit off a generator going down a bumpy highway at 60 miles an hour. Meantime, I can’t stop snapping photos. I’ll keep you posted.