…a week of free care to all comers in a giant outdoor tent. (Sorry, no link, read about it before the Covid shutdown)
Cancer screenings (some much too late) and all that. Dental care.
The journalist who wrote about the experience said the thing that jolted him the most was the teeth. Buckets and buckets and buckets of teeth that were so far gone they could not be treated in any way but by extraction. This is America. Welcome to our health system.
Point #2 on teeth, a convo with my dental hygienist more than a decade ago. I was in my early 60s — she said people start losing their teeth at a great rate after 65. Alarmed, I wondered what kind of dental disease attacked them (soon to be me) that I hadn’t heard about, so I asked… she said, “They no longer have dental insurance from a job and Medicare doesn’t cover teeth.”
Point #3 on teeth, buried in an article about a person who repeatedly traveled between the UK and US. He said orthodontia was much more common in the US, so there were all these perfect smiles in the US, whereas the occasional misalignment was not a big deal in the UK.
But when it came to the difference between the well-off and poor in the two countries, the real diff was between healthy teeth and no teeth. In the US, you get the teeth you can afford, and if you can’t afford dentistry, well, your teeth may end up in a bucket at a charity clinic. In the UK, apparently teeth are part of the national plan.
Well, that’s enough for now.
Just one more thing: I’m going to start calling our Health & Human Services guy RobK instead of BobK, because he not only is not worthy of his father’s name, but this Robert is robbing us of our health. He can just go to hell.
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