“They pull thousands of teeth here. At the end, they’ll have buckets of teeth...” [View all]

[babylonsister]

Shameful.


Sat Jul 19, 2014 at 11:50 AM PDT
“They pull thousands of teeth here. At the end, they’ll have buckets of teeth...”

by james321


Welcome to health care for the rural poor in Virginia, the state just to the south of the capital of the Greatest Nation on God's Green Earth.

It looks like this:

“I just had an 18-year-old have a full mouth extraction because she’s never had dental care,” said Beth Bortz, who runs the Virginia Center for Health Innovation. “It’s not unusual.”

She said patients often want their good teeth removed, too, because they associate teeth with pain. She said health-care providers counsel them to keep them.

And it looks like this:

Every year, hundreds of people have every one of their teeth pulled there. Then they put their names into a denture lottery, with the hope of being picked to get a set of false teeth made for them at the next year’s event. Forty-six people were picked from a list of 700 to get dentures this year.

“They pull thousands of teeth here. At the end, they’ll have buckets of teeth,” said volunteer Jennifer Lee, Virginia’s deputy secretary of health and human resources and an emergency room doctor.

And, well, it looks like this:

In a tent where people waited for a vision exam, McAuliffe knelt beside Martha Deel, whose only job is caring for her brain-injured son. Fifty-one years old, she looked decades older. After her exam, she said she would line up to see a doctor for “the girl stuff.”

No, we're not talking Gaza, or Bangladesh, or rural India, or highland Guatemala, we're talking Virginia -- one of our country's wealthiest states full of highly-profitable defense corporations, like Northrop Gunman, whose share price just rose to $123.87/share -- just in case you were wondering. Killing people is big business in Virginia, but apparently saving the lives -- and dignity...and teeth -- of those who live in this exceptional state that likes to call itself a "Commonwealth" is just not worth the money.


more...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/19/1315138/--They-pull-thousands-of-teeth-here-At-the-end-they-ll-have-buckets-of-teeth#