Kaine: my volunteer work shows the need to expand health coverage in Virginia

Last summer, says Sen Tim Kaine, in an essay published by The Roanoke Times, he joined doctors, nurses, dentists and students camped out in tents, trailers and RVs at the Wise County Fairgrounds to volunteer at the Remote Area Medical Clinic (known as RAM), to provide free medical, dental and vision care to rural Virginians who would otherwise go without that care.

“While I always look forward to the opportunity to volunteer at RAM, I wish we didn't need one in Virginia,” Kaine wrote. “But every year, the volunteers keep coming back because thousands of Virginians keep lining up for care. It's a grim reminder of how many Virginians - many of them working people and their kids - continue to lack access to health insurance.”

About two thirds of the southwest Virginians who flood in when RAM sets up shop, at least two thirds would have health insurance if Medicaid were to be expanded.

And if it were, “Thousands of men, women and children wouldn't have to wait a whole year or travel hundreds of miles to have an infected tooth pulled or get a prescription they need,” Kaine wrote. “They wouldn't have to wait to get a cancer diagnosis which, if caught 11 months earlier, would have been curable.”

It’s not that common for a senator, used to wrestling with the big national issues that make big national headlines, to weigh in on a controversy that has tied up his home state’s legislature.

“But to me, the human impact of Medicaid expansion is the under-told story, and the one worth telling louder,” Kaine wrote.

“How, in the most powerful nation in the world, can this be the case? And how can RAM clinics be necessary? And why, when handed the means to insure 400,000 more people in Virginia, would we turn it down?”

He said that failing to expand Medicaid is akin to withholding access to coverage from 400,000 Virginians.

“If we miss this opportunity, my next trip to the RAM clinic will be the most difficult yet,” he wrote. “How will I be able to explain that Virginia's leaders actively chose to deny these people access to care that folks facing the same economic hardship in Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland have? The choice now lies with members of the General Assembly, and I hope they make the right one.”

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