SITWAP; In Virginia, health fair tends to America's poor
Posted by
Loyola
Aug 3 '09, 07:27
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"Daniel Moore, 38, was waiting to have a broken wisdom tooth extracted and, he hoped, his lungs X-rayed.
"The tooth has been broken for a year and I can't afford to pay a 1,000 dollar dental bill. And the company I work for doesn't supply any insurance," he told AFP.
Moore earns just under 3,000 dollars a month driving trucks for a company that hauls coal from the mines that have long been the lifeblood of Wise and other towns in this corner of Virginia.
The divorced father-of-four pays child maintenance, helps his elderly mother when he can, is paying off a 13,000 dollar hospital bill for a collapsed lung, and has gone hungry in the past to buy his 20-year-old son life-saving insulin for the type one diabetes he has had since birth.
"Sometimes," Moore told AFP as he shuffled forward one spot in the queue toward the dental surgeons who were pulling out the abscessed and rotten teeth of others before him, "it becomes a bit hard to bear."
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