1,045 patients get free care, but hundreds turned away by law

It was Friday, Veterans Day 2016, shortly after 3 a.m. The man was in his early 60s, and he was resting in his car in the Manatee Technical College parking lot. He had arrived later than most of the folks here, but still early enough to snag a ticket numbered in the low 160s.

The man had dental problems, he explained, and came because he had heard that he could get his mouth taken care of — for free — at the Remote Area Medical three-day free clinic.

He had served his country in Vietnam, and he was proud of it — but military service alone doesn’t entitle anyone to dental care. “You have to be 100 percent disabled,” he explained.

He wasn’t the only hero to spend Veterans Day in that parking lot.

His comrades came from all over central Florida with toothaches, missing teeth, vision problems and medical issues. Like him, they waited through the night, some of them arriving as early as mid-afternoon the day before.

Last year, people came from as far away as Texas.

Another veteran, this one younger, explained how an accident 26 years ago had knocked out several of his front teeth, and he had never been able to muster the $5,000 it would cost to repair them.

There are few things more heart-wrenching than to meet a veteran on Veterans Day, waiting all night long for desperately needed care that should have happened a quarter-century ago.

If there is anything worse, it is having to turn that veteran — or any other patient — away.

By any measure, this year’s second annual Remote Area Medical Free Clinic in Bradenton was a smashing success. We provided 3,869 separate dental, medical and vision procedures to 1,046 patients — procedures that would have cost a combined $410,216.

Some of the patients hugged volunteers, tears in their eyes, as they adjusted to the holes in their mouth where the agonizing abscess had been. Others wept as they tried on their new glasses and — for the first time in years — saw their children’s faces in clear focus.

Yet even as we cherish those memories, we will be haunted, too, by the faces of another 200 patients we had to turn away — all because we didn’t have enough medical professionals to treat them.

On Veterans Day, we were forced to close our optical services operations altogether due to a shortage of ophthalmologists. It’s not that these optical professionals didn’t want to help: They did. From all over the southeast, RAM volunteer ophthalmologists told us they wanted very much to soak up the Florida sunshine while rendering care to their fellow human beings. They were ready to pack their bags and help, just as they had packed their bags to work at RAM expeditions throughout the U.S. and all over the world.

What kept them from helping was an archaic and rigid Florida law that needs to be changed.

For reasons that aren’t clear, Florida forbids duly licensed, fully capable out-of-state medical professionals from donating their care here — even when they do so free of charge on an emergency basis to patients at free clinics like RAM’s.

These are highly capable (and highly priced) medical professionals who treat patients in Houston, or Atlanta, or Washington, D.C., every day. Their licenses are in good standing, yet they are forbidden from providing care in Florida, even for free — and it doesn’t matter that the patient can’t get help any other way.

In its 825 medical clinics nationwide, Remote Area Medical has provided at least $102 million worth of care to more than 650,000 patients, and it hasn’t cost taxpayers a dime.

In all our years, the only question we asked our patients was, “Where does it hurt?”

With an outdated law keeping out-of-state volunteer doctors at the state line, it’s now time to ask Florida legislators and Gov. Rick Scott another question: “Why?”

This story was originally published November 16, 2016 at 2:30 PM with the headline "1,045 patients get free care, but hundreds turned away by law."