Virginia Foxx Should Open Her Eyes

In this photo: Mason Hardin, 7, and his brother Matthew, 8, wait in line before sunrise last Friday to enter a Remote Area Medical (RAM) health clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds in Wise, Virginia. The free clinic, which lasts 2-1/2 days, is the largest of its kind in the nation providing medical, dental and vision services from more than 1,400 medical volunteers to thousands of mountain residents. For many this is the only medical care they may receive each year. (For this and several other Reuters photos of this event, happening this weekend just over the mountain, see this site.)

The 10th annual Remote Area Medical (RAM) Health Expedition opened its doors at the Wise County Fairgrounds at 6 a.m. Friday morning, with almost 2,000 people already in line. The people volunteering to run this event had given out 1,600 numbers by 5 a.m., an hour before the start. (Local coverage in the Kingsport Times-News.)

The pictures of people receiving basic medical care in fairground horse stalls might seer into your conscience, if you had one. It took a British wire service -- Reuters -- to even document it. No American network news cameras were there (that we know of), possibly because there was no celebrity in line.

This is the state of American health care. This is what the American insurance industry has yielded.

This is what Virginia Foxx denies. This is what Virginia Foxx turns her hardened heart away from. This is what Virginia Foxx would not see, even if she looked in that general direction.

Virginia Foxx, on Friday, the same day that the horse stalls at the Wise County Fairgrounds hosted thousands of people with no health insurance and precious little health care, stood up at a Capitol Hill press conference and said, "There are no Americans who don't have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare."

We guess she was talking about this: If you fall down in the public street with a heart attack, or get hit by a skate-boarder, someone will eventually pick you up and take you to an emergency room. That's what she means. And because that is true, despite the thousands at the Wise County Fairgrounds and the millions like them all across this wide expanse, we do not need to reform health care in American, sez Madam Foxx, currently insured by a superb government-sponsored health-care plan that you and I are paying for and which she and her family will enjoy for the rest of her unnatural life.

There is no hell hot enough.