The District Chronicles

Issue date: 3/14/10 Section: Divine Intervention

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Noemi Rasgado and Antoinette Hamilton are in the same boat. Both are sick and both work. But neither makes enough to afford health insurance, which forces them to go without health care as the clock ticks down toward an emergency.

But Rasgado, with her sinus infection, and Hamilton, with her chronic high blood pressure, found medical attention for the first time in years at an embryonic clinic in New Orleans created to treat people like them. They hope it will be a permanent medical home.

Founded on philanthropy and patterned on a similar clinic that has treated more than 50,000 patients over 23 years in Memphis, Tenn., the New Orleans Faith Health Alliance aspires to be the doctor's office for a single category of patients: those who are working but without health insurance.

That would be Hamilton, a 48-year-old single mother of two who used to have medical insurance before Hurricane Katrina blew away her job nearly five years ago. She found work again, but her new job didn't come with insurance.

Without medicine, monitoring, and someone to encourage her to diet, Hamilton was headed into stroke territory, kidney failure or some other calamity.

Similarly, Rasgado, another single mother who works as a hotel housekeeper, said she hadn't seen a doctor in four years. She was ineffectually dosing her sinus infection with over-the-counter remedies until she came away from the clinic with two prescriptions. Each paid $20 for her visit.

A study done for the alliance estimated there are 80,000 uninsured workers like Hamilton and Rasgado in the city - almost 20 percent of the population - including most of the city's undocumented workers, said Bob Marye, the clinic's fundraiser.

"They're living with tumors, with undiagnosed diabetes, with chronic hypertension," said Marye. "And eventually it catches up with them. And when they get sick, they show up in the ER. And you know what that is - about the most expensive kind of medicine you can practice."

The clinic is opening against the backdrop of a national debate over health care reform, which may or may not extend health care to the thousands of patients the New Orleans clinic seeks to serve.

The reform debate "muddies the water certainly," said Marye. "You might think there'd be no more need for us. But under the most extravagant proposals, which wouldn't go into effect for two years or so, a significant fraction of the population would still be left out, so the local uninsured might fall from 20 percent to around 7 percent."

Continued...

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