The Grapes of Wrath Revisited: Health Care for the Poor in Tulsa
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Guardian UK: “If you didn’t have the assistance of the clinic, what would you be able to do? Can you turn to the government? Can anybody help you?”
Johnnie Levy: “The only other thing I could do, and I try to do this every day, is turn to the Lord.”
Something is seriously wrong when your only option after employer-sponsored health insurance is the emergency room, or God almighty. That is one seriously broken health care system. If you’re under 65, not a veteran, don’t have employer-provided health insurance, and don’t qualify for Medicaid, you’re screwed. God help you if you get sick. Excuse me if I find that just a little bit perverse.
The Guardian UK is going on a video journey, retracing the path of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to find out how the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression is affecting lower-income Americans.
Tulsa has seen its share of poverty and desperation over the years. In the 1930s, it saw a tide of hundreds of thousands struggling west along Route 66 to escape economic collapse in the north and the notorious dustbowl of drought and wind across the Midwest. Whether they had lost their land or their jobs, that flow of desperate humanity – chronicled so devastatingly through the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath – struggled hard to find enough to feed and clothe their children as they trekked towards an illusory dream of prosperity in distant California.
To travel the old road today – stumbling across crumbling ghost towns and half-abandoned communities, across the sprawling Native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren’t sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor - is to encounter new despair, some of it still recognisable to the Joads.
The banks are once again evicting. Foreclosures plague the parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico traversed by the evicted 70 years ago.
But the monster – as Steinbeck described the financial system – has spawned modern beasts unknown to the Joads, such as the vast multinationals discarding American workers in favour of cheaper labour in Mexico and the health insurance companies that cut off the medical lifelines to the gravely ill.
Watch the video and read the whole article here.
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