Fourth World Medical Relief Comes to LA…& More

SOME QUICK NOTES ON TWO LA STORIES:

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1. DESPERATE FOR CARE

Remote Area Medical Care is a nonprofit that used to airlift medical relief to isolated regions of the Amazon. A couple of years ago, RAM began doing 60 percent of its work in rural America because, said the organization’s founder, the need in rural US is just so great.

Starting Tuesday, in case you aren’t already aware, Rural Medical Care went a step further and decided to do some desperately needed urban clinics. Los Angeles is one of their first and they are providing a free medical and dental clinic at the LA Forum for a week.

KPCC’s Patricia Nazarrio was there on Tuesday as thousands of LA residents, who otherwise couldn’t afford care, lined up., many for most of the night. But still there were too many to be treated.

The Daily Breeze also has a good story on the clinic, reporting that people came from both San Diego and Santa Barbara counties

[ RAM founder, Sam Brock] said although health care reform has become a hot-button issue, RAM quietly continues its work of helping people.

“An infected tooth can’t wait while Congress debates health care reform,” Brock said. “We’re taking care of people who need help now.”

Yet, while an expected 10,000 of our fellow Californians sorely in need of medical and/or dental care will stand in lines hour after hour in the hope of getting just a bit of that needed care, the national television news channels have devoted an obscene amount of time talking about the complete and unconscionable falsehood about “death panels”—as if it was an actual topic for discussion instead of dismissing it for what it is: the most deliberate and cynical kind of lie.

The disconnect is getting a bit hard to take.

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2. DRUGS & MURDER ON SKID ROW;

One more article that is worth your time is by Ari Bloomekatz for the LA Times about how the LAMP Community, one of Skid Row’s most respected housing providers for the area’s homeless, seemed to have failed to see when drugs were being dealt regularly out of Lamp Lodge, a facility for the mentally ill homeless run by LAMP. The dealing, Ari reports, ultimately led to a double homicide inside the Lodge when fighting over drug selling turf suddenly escalated.

Bloomekatz is very even-handed in his presentation of the issue, going for complexity rather than a sensational, black and white story.

He writes: “The case underscores the difficulty of keeping even “safe zones” free of narcotics activities in such a drug-plagued area, despite efforts by the LAPD in recent years to crack down on skid row crime.”

“One of the questions that we do have to ask is how a narcotics dealer and a hit man ended up meeting inside of a room inside the Lamp Lodge that was actually supposed to be a secure facility for mentally ill people,” said Capt. Blake Chow.

Yep. Despite LAMPs excellent work on Skid Row, we definitely need to be asking those questions.

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Okay, now back to Alan.

PS: I learned yesterday that Alex Sanchez bail hearing has been put off until October.

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Photo by Robert Casillas for the Daily Breeze