An ambitious effort to hold a massive free medical-care event in Chicago has stalled, but the push to make it happen is about to have an immediate impact on Illinois health care.
On Saturday Gov. Pat Quinn is expected to sign a bill making Illinois the second state in the country to allow doctors and dentists licensed in other states to volunteer their services without obtaining state authorization, a process that can take more than a month and cost hundreds of dollars.
Supporters expect this change to the state’s Good Samaritan laws, which applies only to out-of-state doctors providing charity care at free clinics, to directly benefit the more than 1.6 million uninsured Illinois residents.
“Any time you can take a speed bump out, take away borders from health care, it helps,” said Dr. Ken Nelson, the medical director at Community Nurse Adult Clinic in La Grange and a driving force behind the bill. “Not everybody is going to get insurance.”
It is unlikely the legislation would have been proposed were it not for an attempt to hold a Remote Area Medical event in Chicago. R.A.M., a Tennessee-based organization founded in 1985 to bring free health, dental and vision care to geographically isolated people around the world, broadened its scope to major urban areas in 2009 with a clinic in Los Angeles. Inspired by the need the event demonstrated–more than 6,000 people were treated and thousands more turned away–a group of Chicago-area doctors led by Dr. Nelson and Rama Jager, an ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Chicago Medical Center, began working with R.A.M. to schedule a similar clinic here.
R.A.M. founder Stan Brock told the Chicago group that in order to make that happen, the state’s medical code had to be amended.
“The greatest impediment to what R.A.M. does, except here in Tennessee where they had the good sense to change the law back in 1995, is that for some extraordinary reason a doctor, dentist–even nurses who are licensed to the same standards–are not allowed to cross state lines to provide free care for people in another state,” Mr. Brock said.
Lifting these restrictions, Mr. Brock said later, would lead to “a quantum leap in volunteerism in this country.”
Dr. Nelson worked with the Chicago Medical Society to draft the necessary legislation, and the bills sailed through the House and Senate last spring without opposition.
Scheduling a Chicago R.A.M. event proved to be tougher. An expedition tentatively planned for late August at the University of Illinois in Chicago was abandoned over logistical problems and what organizers described as a falling-out between Mr. Brock and a group of dentists who were set to volunteer. Drs. Nelson and Jager have formed a new group called Chicago Urban Relief and Education (CURE) and are planning a free-care event for next summer that is partnered with R.A.M. rather than run by it.
“The thing that I realized is that in order to make this sustainable,” Dr. Jager said, “we better do a damn good job. Then we better make sure we have grassroots support, which is why we’re doing it by Chicagoans for Chicagoans, as opposed to having an event controlled by an organization that’s not headquartered in Chicago.”
Mr. Brock praised the new Illinois law and said his group still plans to be part of a local event.
“We look forward to being in Chicago and having a very successful operation in the months ahead. We just need to find a time and a place.”
The truth is that there is no such thing a free health care. Somebody somewhere is always paying for it.