FARGO, N.D. – Thirty-seven year old Cindy of Fargo, North Dakota is in a bind with her health insurance. She can’t afford to use it, but she can’t afford to lose it, either.
After Cindy became unemployed last December, she got a job as a temp paralegal. Her income went down, but her expenses went up. She now pays more than $500 month for her COBRA health plan.
She didn’t want to risk going without insurance, as her recent bout of thyroid cancer might exclude her from qualifying for future health benefits. But with expenses as high as they are, even additional doctor co-pays are beyond her budget. So, they go without care as much as possible.
In this video, Cindy explains her predicament, and paints a portrait what it’s really like to live in the small community of Fargo, North Dakota.
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 Consumer Reports winnebago I’m living in this summer passed through Bowman, North Dakota yesterday, where we stayed in an RV park that was more like someone’s back yard. Our fresh water came from the owner’s personal outdoor hose, and the makeshift site marker was paint on a wooden plaque. I’d give up luxury for character any day.
Our backyard for a night was the field of grain, above. I wanted to run through it and flop myself down, but figured I should respect private property. The scene made a normally mundane morning of fact-checking and email not feel like work at all.
So we’re officially in the West. Next stop: Thermopolis, Wyoming, home of the world’s largest natural hot-springs. Check out more of the photos I’ve been taking on the Cover America Tour website.
I’ve been on the road with a Consumer Reports Health project for more than seven weeks. We’ve filmed almost every day, and I’ve kept up with the video production as best as I could. As it write this blog, there are 49 videos on the Cover America Tour website!
Of those videos, I think I have a favorite: Dave of Asheboro, North Carolina.
This 64-year old used to do IT work for the military, then put in a few decades at a very well-known “global consumer goods” company. After 42 years he says, he was let go, and his retirement benefits went with the job. But Dave didn’t have the luxury of going into early retirement. At 64-years-old, he had to go into the job market looking for a full time job with benefits that would cover himself and his wife until she becomes eligible for Medicare.
We all know that life throws some blows at you sometimes. But this Ronald Reagan-loving Southern Grandpa says his health care woes are making him lose faith in our political system. I wonder how many other Americans are starting to feel the same way. We’re sure meeting a lot of them on this trip.
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:
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.
The sound of a metal bat hitting concrete is constant on Sunday in Brooklyn’s McCarren park. On the first sunny weekend of the Greenpoint Neighborhood softball season, dozens gathered to play a little ball. Some have been coming since 1971, dressed in sweatpants and jerseys. But in recent years, some players have been showing up in formal black loafers, dress pants and white button-down shirts. They’re called the Stormers, a team of young, mostly Hasidic Jews.
I’m doing a series of stories on the team. A radio feature aired on the local NPR station, WNYC this past weekend:
This year’s International Landmine Awareness Day was especially significant to Colombians. In 2007, the South American country reported the highest number of mine and explosive remnants of war casualties in the world. On April 4th, Colombia’s major weekly paper, Semana, published part of my documentary web project, Remnants of War. Last year, I produced a series of black and white photo-slideshows, interactive graphics and timelines to help understand how the country’s rapidly increasing landmine problem affects innocent civilians. I traveled all over Colombia with a Human Rights Watch researcher to gather the material for the multimedia presentation, and later produced a bi-lingual version for their website.
That’s Andres, an 18-year-old survivor of an explosive remnant of war. He picked up what looked like a battery attached to a cable, and the device went off in his hand. Now he has difficulty cultivating coffee and hasn’t returned to school.
His story is all too common. The landmine victims I talked to all faced difficulties returning to a normal life after their accident. Many of them were without adequate medical and financial assistance, unable to continue agricultural work, or were forced to flee from the countryside. Take Manuel, for instance, in this picture to the right. He has to take an all night bus to see his doctor in Medellin, and agricultural work now gives him pain.
Here are the 2006 statistics from the Landmine Monitor report on Colombia:
