In the thick of August, President Obama has a very specific challenge: to yank the health care reform conversation up out of the weeds and back into the broad, easily understandable consensus he tapped during the campaign—that the current system is a disastrous failure that grows more expensive and less effective every year we continue to wallow in it. People have to become more afraid of the devil they know than the one they don’t. Which is why we need to see a lot more about things like the Rural Area Medical Volunteer Corps.
The group, which has been getting sporadic coverage as a counterpoint to the GOP’s town hall protests, started back in 1985 as an effort to bring care to people in remote areas of poor countries. Today, 60 percent of its work is in the U.S. The REUTERS piece below is from an event RAM held in rural Virginia a couple of weeks ago, where more than a thousand people lined up to get basic care. It’s powerful footage, particularly because those lined up are the poor and working-class whites that the GOP wants the world to believe are powering its protests. Obama and his Democratic allies need to get this kind of stuff back into the forefront of the public discussion.
—KAI WRIGHT