Misery Outside and Mercy Inside
Like sad clockwork, the economy stumbles and a familiar word reappears. Health care becomes the health care “crisis.”
I’ve come to the community of Venice to take a look. At this other ground zero, America’s proud image of itself is tested everyday.
One of the country’s biggest safety nets is here. But it’s not big enough, and beneath it is something very close to nothing.
The Venice Family Clinic is the largest free clinic in the U.S. It serves the poor who live in the vast pockets and veins spread through one of our richest regions--the Westside of Los Angeles. In this part of town, there are perhaps 120,000 people without health insurance. This clinic, with three offices, cares for 18,000 of them--most of them working people still striving for the American dream, and finding a piece of it here.
In ways that touch scores of men, women and children every day, the Venice Family Clinic is an American celebration. In ways that touch many more of us, it would be a far greater success if it were driven out of business.
“It would be a wonderful day for this country if we no longer had a reason to exist,” says Linda Feldman, a fund-raiser and communications director for the clinic.
She is speaking about some dreamy far-off day when all Americans can count on basic health care, no matter whether they work down at the bottom of the economy or they get chronically sick or whether they’re young and have no choice in things.
A more pressing reality is the eerie economics: Health insurance is now beyond the reach of 39 million people in the U.S.--nearly 14% of the population. Costs are soaring, businesses are retrenching and government budgets face the stranglehold of recession. As I said, clockwork.
“You know that moment just before a thunderstorm?” the clinic’s CEO, Elizabeth Benson Forer, says to me as we tour this clean, inviting building of glass and stucco. “That’s where we are now. The wind hasn’t kicked up. The big rain isn’t falling. But it’s about to; it’s ominous.”
But sweeping numbers and eerie predictions omit what is seldom discussed: The haves and have-nots in the nation are not neatly divided. In our absurd patchwork of care, some of the poor rate services more comprehensive than provided by standard insurance. Others are simply left out, turned away for triage in miserable, overburdened emergency rooms. Those in the middle never rest easy. The whole system is anchored in a foundation of loose sand.
As we walk through the Venice clinic, I count 21 patients and parents. It is a morning for children’s checkups. Every youngster not only sees a doctor but is given a book to encourage reading. Medicine is free. Patients can obtain mental health services in the same office, and eyeglasses too. The homeless get a shower and clean clothes.
What I cannot see are the 20 other sick and downtrodden people who call today and are told that there is no room for them, sorry.
Contrasts like this infuriate me. I believe in the goodness and greatness of the United States. I’ve been known to defend the old myth, handed down to us as children, that there is no country to equal this one.
As for the goodness, it’s here in Venice: 500 volunteer doctors, donated medicines and books, a fired-up staff drawing its spirit from the honorable urges of humanitarianism, plus a community willing, year after year, to provide half of the clinic’s $12-million operating budget with charity donations.
But greatness? Let’s put that idea on ice. We’re not even close.
The Venice clinic cannot do it all even in one of the wealthiest communities in a wealthy country. Year by year, its services hang by a stretched thread of government grants, which provide the other half of the operating budget. Every county, state and federal spending cut is eyed here as a matter of survival.
In this working-class neighborhood of this mixed community, there is a glass door three paces from the sidewalk. On one side of it is mercy, on the other side misery. Some people will see a doctor today and they’ll get a kindly smile and medicine to make them well. Some won’t.
