If you don't think anything is wrong with the American healthcare system, take a stroll through the freezing rain today to the Oregon Convention Center, where several thousand people have been lining up since yesterday morning for the chance to receive free dental care.
An army of 1,000 volunteers and dentists are planning to treat 2,000 people over the two-day Oregon Mission of Mercy at the Convention Center. The need is enormous and the desperation clear: the first person in line showed up yesterday at 9AM.
When I showed up at 8:30 this morning, an Obama-length line of people, many wrapped in emergency space blankets and huddling against the cold stretched around the building. The Red Cross spent the morning handing out the silver blankets to patients, but by the time I arrived, they had run out and were reduced to distributing garbage bags with holes cut in the top to serve as ponchos.
The clinic reached daily capacity before it officially opened—people who arrived to the line after about 5:30 AM were told that they could camp out all day and through the night to guarantee a spot for tomorrow.
Renee Piersen and Ken Nelsen were first in line to be seen Tuesday and say they plan to sleep in the line, if necessary, to see a dentist tomorrow: they collected bottles and cans to cover the gas money to drive to the Convention Center from Forest Grove. Both are disabled and unemployed. Piersen needs a couple cavities filled, but Nelsen has a dead tooth that needs pulling—just extracting a tooth has a pricetag of about $200. "It's dead, but there's still a few nerves in there," says Nelsen, pointing to a tooth at the back of his mouth.
Farther up the line, John Hailey complained of the havoc chronic diabetes and no insurance had wreaked on his mouth. From a pocket in his jacket, Hailey pulled out a tiny Ziploc bag with three rotten teeth in it; he yanked them out with his bare hand six months ago, he says. "It hurt less to pull them out than leave them in," says Hailey.
More stories and an explanation of why it's so hard to get cheap dental care in Oregon below the cut.