MINUTES-02
many others have been left out. Millions of Americans can`t afford the
health insurance exchanges. For the sake of those people, Obamacare told
the states to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poor.
But twenty states declined. So, in those states, more than three million
people are falling into a gap they make too much to qualify as destitute
for Medicaid, but not enough to buy insurance.>
THE HEALTH WAGON
BILL WHITAKER: More than eleven million people have signed up for Obamacare. But many others have been left out. Millions of Americans can`t afford the health insurance exchanges. For the sake of those people, Obamacare told the states to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poor. But twenty states declined. So, in those states, more than three million people are falling into a gap--they make too much to qualify as destitute for Medicaid, but not enough to buy insurance. As Scott Pelley first reported in April 2014, we met some of these people when he tagged along in a busted RV called the Health Wagon--medical mercy for those left out of Obamacare.
(Begin VT)
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The tight folds of the Cumberland Mountains mark the point of western Virginia that splits Kentucky and Tennessee--the very center of Appalachia--a land rich in soft coal and hard times. Around Wise County, folks are welcomed by storefronts to remember what life was like before unemployment hit nine percent.
TERESA GARDNER: The roads are narrow and windy curves. So it-- it`s not easy to-- to drive the bus.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): This is Teresa Gardner`s territory. She can`t be more than five-foot-four but she muscles the bus through the hollers, deaf to the complaints, of a thirteen-year-old Winnebago that`s left its best miles behind it.
TERESA GARDNER: Having problems seeing here.
SCOTT PELLEY: You really can`t see.
TERESA GARDNER: Yeah.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The wipers are nearly shot and the defroster`s out cold.
There you go. You can see a little better now.
TERESA GARDNER: Right.
SCOTT PELLEY: I understand there`s a hole in the floorboard here somewhere?
TERESA GARDNER: Yes, it`s right over there so don`t get in that area.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The old truck may be a ruin but like most RVs it`s pretty good at discovering America. Gardner and her partner, Paula Meade, are nurse practitioners aboard the Health Wagon, a charity that puts free health care on the road.
PAULA MEADE: How many patients do we have on the schedule today? He was going to see what he can free up for us.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The Health Wagon pulls up in parking lots across six counties in southwestern Virginia.
TERESA GARDNER: Y`all come on in out of the rain.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): It`s not long before the waiting room is packed.
PAULA MEADE: Hello, Mister Hank. How are you doing?
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): And two exam rooms are full.
PAULA MEADE: Hold your breath for me.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): With advanced degrees in nursing, Gardner and Meade are allowed to diagnose illnesses, write prescriptions, order tests and X-rays.
TERESA GARDNER: Take your tongue out, ahhh.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): On average there are twenty patients a day, that`s recently up by seventy percent. The Health Wagon is a small operation that started back in 1980. It runs mostly on federal grants and corporate and private donations.
TERESA GARDNER: Blood pressure been high before?
WOMAN: Just when I get aggravated.
SCOTT PELLEY: Who are these people who come into the van?
PAULA MEADE: They are people that are in desperate need. They have no insurance and they usually wait, we say, until they are train wrecks. Their blood pressures come in emergency levels. We have blood sugars come in five, six hundreds because they can`t afford their insulin.
SCOTT PELLEY: But why do they not see a doctor or a nurse before they become, as you call it, train wrecks?
PAULA MEADE: Because they don`t have any money. They don`t have money to pay for labs. They don`t have money to go to an ER and these are very proud people. They, you know, you go to the ER, you get a thirty-five-hundred- dollar bill. And then what do you do? You`re given a prescription, you can`t fill it. That`s why they`re train wrecks.
TERESA GARDNER: Mm-Hm.
PAULA MEADE: They have nowhere else to go.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Glenda Moore had nowhere to go but the ER when the pain in her leg became unbearable. Her job at McDonald`s, making biscuits, didn`t include insurance that she could afford.
GLENDA MOORE: The only doctor that would see me you had to have a hundred and fourteen dollars upfront just to be seen.
SCOTT PELLEY: What does a hundred and fourteen dollars mean to your monthly budget? How big of--
GLENDA MOORE: Oh, my gosh. That`s half of my weekly pay. I make seven dollars and eighty cents an hour. My paycheck was about-- after taxes about four hundred and seventy-five dollars every two weeks.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The pain was from a blood clot. She needed Lovenox, a clot buster that costs about five hundred dollars for a full treatment.
PAULA MEADE: Was she on Lovenox when she was discharged from the hospital?
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Paula Meade got the call from the ER, which didn`t want to bear the cost. The Health Wagon had the drug for free and there was no charge for some stern medical advice.
PAULA MEADE: You are going to die if you don`t quit smoking.
GLENDA MOORE: Okay.
PAULA MEADE: And it could be within a week. You need to stop now.
GLENDA MOORE: Okay.
PAULA MEADE: Okay?
GLENDA MOORE: Okay.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): She took the advice to stop smoking and took Lovenox but one day she felt so bad she went back to the ER.
GLENDA MOORE: And they did a CAT scan and an X-ray and found the blood clot had went to my lung. But they also saw another mass on my lung. And then transported me to a bigger hospital. They found the lesions in my brain, so I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and brain cancer.
SCOTT PELLEY: What are the doctors telling you?
GLENDA MOORE: I start my treatment on Monday, the brain radiation, and he seemed very, I mean he seemed optimistic.
SCOTT PELLEY: Are you hopeful?
GLENDA MOORE: I am. I have been. I don`t know. I just-- I feel very hopeful.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Hope, especially when the odds are long, has always been essential to survival in Appalachia. The recovery from the Great Recession hasn`t arrived. In coal these days they just take the top off the mountain and you don`t need many men for that. Around here about a thousand have been laid off in the last two years. Twelve percent of the folks don`t have enough to eat. And we met them waiting for their number at Zion Family Ministries Church where a charity called Feeding America was handing out just enough to get through a week--if you stretch. One thousand six hundred and fifty-four lined up--a parking lot of possibilities for Gardner, Meade, and the Health Wagon. They`ve known these people and each other most their lives.
You`ve been together since eighth grade?
TERESA GARDNER: Yes.
PAULA MEADE: Eighth grade. Yes.
SCOTT PELLEY: Why do you do this work?
PAULA MEADE: Because somebody has to. You know, there`s people here, you know, we always, we had dreams. We wanted to move away from here. We all, you know, we did. And then we come back and we saw the need. And actually there`s a vulnerable population here that`s different from the rest of America. I mean there are people, you can replicate this. But we`re kind of forgotten.
TERESA GARDNER: Mm-Hm.
PAULA MEADE: There`s no one here to take care of them but us.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): These patients would be taken care of in the thirty states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare. The federal government pays the extra cost to the states for three years but Virginia and the others that have opted out fear that the cost in the future could bankrupt them. So the Health Wagon patients we met have fallen through this unintended gap.
TERESA GARDNER: Do you have insurance?
MAN #1: No, Ma`am.
TERESA GARDNER: No, okay.
SCOTT PELLEY: Have any of you tried to sign up for the President`s health insurance plan?
SISSY CANTRELL: No.
BRITTANY PHIPPS: No.
WALTER LANEY: No.
SCOTT PELLEY: Why not?
BRITTANY PHIPPS: I can`t afford it.
SISSY CANTRELL: I can`t either.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Sissy Cantrell was laid off from a Head Start center. She`s been suffering from migraines and seizures.
SISSY CANTRELL: I cry for no reason at all.
PAULA MEADE: Have you been seeing a counselor?
SISSY CANTRELL: No.
PAULA MEADE: Okay.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): She came away from the Health Wagon with medication.
BRITTANY PHIPPS: Okay.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Brittany Phipps works more than fifty hours a week, but that`s two part-time jobs so there`s no insurance for her diabetes.
So you`re getting your insulin through the Health Wagon?
BRITTANY PHIPPS: I am now. Yeah.
SCOTT PELLEY: And if that wasn`t available, where would you get the insulin?
BRITTANY PHIPPS: I don`t know.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Walter Laney`s diabetes blinded him in one eye and threatens the other. The Health Wagon stabilized him and set him up with a specialist.
DR. ISAACS (ph): Hey Walter, this is Doctor Isaacs, how`s it going?
WALTER LANEY: Now it`s going pretty good.
DR. ISAACS: How`ve your sugars been?
WALTER LANEY: Okay.
They got my blood sugars back under control. Before this year, I was in the hospital three, four times and this year, I ain`t been in none since I`ve been seeing them. If it hadn`t been for them, I don`t think I`d be here today.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Outside the church where they were handing out food we met Doctor Joe Smiddy, a lung specialist who`s the Health Wagon`s volunteer medical director.
DR. JOE SMIDDY: This is a Third World country of diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer, and COPD.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Doctor Smiddy drives a second Health Wagon, a tractor-trailer X-ray lab.
I guess they taught you something about radiology and all of that in medical school. Did they teach you how to drive an eighteen-wheeler?
DR. JOE SMIDDY: I did have to go to tractor-trailer school. And it took a long time.
SCOTT PELLEY: Was-- was that harder than medical school in some ways?
DR. JOE SMIDDY: It-- it was very difficult to get anyone to insure a doctor to drive a tractor-trailer. Insurance companies didn`t believe me.
WOMAN: Hold it.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): His X-ray screen is a window on chronic, untreated disease, including black lung from the mines.
DR. JOE SMIDDY: We`ve seen coal workers pneumoconiosis, emphysema, COPD, enlarged hearts. There`s fifteen of the twenty-six had significant abnormalities here today.
SCOTT PELLEY: Just today?
DR. JOE SMIDDY: Just today.
SCOTT PELLEY: But when they leave your Health Wagon, they still don`t have health insurance. How do they get treated for these things that you`re finding?
DR. JOE SMIDDY: We negotiate. We can-- we can talk to the hospital system. We-- we don`t leave any patient unattended. We-- we raise money for them.
SCOTT PELLEY: You find a way.
DR. JOE SMIDDY: We will find a way.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): They found a way to get Glenda Moore radiation for her brain cancer. But she`d been a smoker for twenty-five years. And she died three months after our interview.
You don`t like this idea of receiving charity?
GLENDA MOORE: No. Oh, I hate it. My dad was in the military. And when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was taken care of. And I don`t know, I just always assumed, you know, that`s how it would work.
SCOTT PELLEY: Do you think things would have been different if you`d had an opportunity to go to a doctor more often?
GLENDA MOORE: Oh, definitely. I know it would be different.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): The outreach to all the people like Glenda Moore costs the Health Wagon about a million and a half dollars a year, a third of that is from those federal grants, and the rest from donations. Doctors volunteer and pharmaceutical companies donate drugs. But when we were with them--
TERESA GARDNER: We got no electricity like on the house side.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): --they sure could have used a new truck battery.
TERESA GARDNER: There goes. Yay. Can we give you all a free flu shot while you`re here for helping us?
MAN #2: Need a free flu shot, Beaver?
MAN #3: Nope.
PAULA MEADE: These were the ones I think we need to focus on.
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): Teresa Gardner and Paula Meade apply for grants. And travel to churches praying for donations and passing the plate.
Are there days you say to yourself, I can`t do this anymore?
PAULA MEADE: Oh, every day. Not every day. I shouldn`t say every day. There are a lot of days that you go home, you`re so frustrated because we`re writing grants till ten o`clock at night. We`re begging for money. And you`re almost in tears because we`re like, okay, what are we going to do, because I`ve got a family too. And it gets frustrating, it gets hard.
SCOTT PELLEY: It`s enough to wear you out, Teresa.
TERESA GARDNER: We`re pretty beat down by the end of the day on most days. But we do get more out of it then we-- we ever give.
PAULA MEADE: When you look at it practically, you think, what in the world am I thinking? But then I have that one patient that may come in and say, couldn`t bring you anything, I can`t pay anything, here`s a quilt I want to give you. And I mean when they do that and they`re so heartfelt and they put their arms around you, I don`t know what I`d do without you.
So you`re doing a lot better?
MAN #4: Yes.
PAULA MEADE: It lets you think, okay, I was put here for a purpose.
TERESA GARDNER: And you can do it another day.
MAN #5: You`re a blessing to us.
TERESA GARDNER: Well thank you all. You`re blessing us.
It`s them and that`s what touches our heart.
(End VT)
BILL WHITAKER: Since this story first aired, Meade and Gardner have a new Health Wagon and it`s logged a lot of miles. Virginia still has not expanded Medicaid. And this sad news, Walter Laney has died of complications from his diabetes.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
END
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