Commentary: Cuts to U.S. health funding will bring pain without end

Commentary: Cuts to U.S. health funding will bring pain without end
By Ben Barber | Special to McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sunday, May 1, 2011

I’ve just been in tooth hell for a week. An abscess left me dazed and in constant pain day and night. Finally, a dental surgeon cut my tooth into pieces to extract it, leaving a hole in my gum that still aches. I take two antibiotics, rinse with a third, wash with warm salt water and take pain killers.

I write about my tooth ordeal because as I sat reading National Geographic in the waiting room to distract my mind from the impending “procedure,” I thought of the billions of people who have such pain day and night throughout their lives. Pain without end.

These are the ones we see in the late night video fund raising appeals. Or those selling fruits in the background of news photos from Abidjan showing burnt trucks and soldiers strutting across the pavement.

I’ve spent more than a decade overseas in very, very poor countries writing about politics, war, climate and agriculture. But I always knew that when I or my family was in need of medical care, there was someplace we could go. In Casablanca or Bangkok or Colombo or Delhi I always found a well-trained doctor or dentist.

When my baby girl was born in Bangkok the obstetrician had been trained at University of Chicago. When she developed jaundice and need a full transfusion of all her blood the pediatrician had been trained at UCLA.