In the early hours of Sunday morning, 48 hours before America went to the polls, lines of people began queuing at the First Baptist Church on Main Street, in Clinton, Tennessee.
The parking lot had been filling since midnight. Inside the church’s gymnasium, rows of cubicles built over the preceding days were ready to receive over 300 patients looking for free dental, eye and medical care from the non-profit organisation Remote Area Medical.
“Free dental, vision and medical services are provided on a first-come, first-served basis,” the notice read. “All services are free and open to the public. No ID required.”
This is the reality of the healthcare crisis in America, where there is no free National Health Service – and a staggering 27 million people have no health insurance to pay for treatment. Millions more are “underinsured” meaning they can’t access treatment. Now, President Trump’s reelection threatens even Obamacare, a Democrat attempt at helping the poorest Americans access health services.
While in Britain, queues grow for dentists, in America, desperate people are driving three days across state lines, sleeping in cars and on mattresses – and queuing for hours in the sun and rain for free, pop-up medical treatment. “When you speak to people who come to RAM events, it’s not just about the medical treatment,” says RAM’s CEO Jeff Eastman. “It’s about being treated as a human being. There is no shame. It’s neighbours helping neighbours. It restores people’s faith in human kindness.”
RAM is the legacy of an extraordinary British man, Stan Brock – an intrepid former British cowboy and maverick care health provider who died from cancer in 2018, aged 82. Born in Preston, Stan found his fame wrestling snakes on the long-running US TV show Wild Kingdom, which at its height, had 32 million viewers. But his real legacy lies here – where men, women and children are having painful teeth pulled, mammograms done, plus stitches and glasses.
Stan’s vision for Remote Area Medical came when he was injured after being thrown from a horse while living among the Wapishana people in Guyana. “I was isolated from medical care, which was about a 26-day journey away,” he said. “I witnessed the near devastation of whole tribes by what would have been simple or minor illnesses to more advanced cultures. “When I left Guyana, I vowed to find a way to deliver basic medical aid to people in the world’s inaccessible regions. RAM is the way I have kept that promise, not only to the Wapishana Indians, but to thousands around the world.”
What might shock outsiders is the level of need not in Guyana, but in America, the world’s richest country, where Stan eventually made his home in the Appalachian Mountains. “Stan’s life taught me that one person can make a difference,” says Jeff, who became CEO of RAM after Stan passed away in 2018. “He changed the lives of one million patients because of his leadership.”
Founded in 1985, nearly 213,000 RAM volunteers, including dentists, doctors and vets, have since treated more than 940,000 people with over $200million worth of free healthcare services. It’s a vision of what would face the UK without our National Health Service, which Stan Brock saw created as a young boy growing up in Lancashire and Dorset.
Stan’s extraordinary life is one of the great untold stories of the 20th century – a fact British filmmaker Paul Michael Angell intends to correct with his documentary Stan Brock: Medicine Man. “Stan had had so many lives,” he says. “In my notes I wrote ‘The seven stages of Stan – Lancashire lad, Amazon cowboy, naturalist, daredevil, actor, author and pioneering philanthropist’.”
In his film, it is hard to reconcile the once Crocodile Dundee-like star of Wild Kingdom with the shy, self-effacing man who sleeps in the RAM office on a neat bedding roll and lives on the same daily diet of beans, kale and lentils made with the kettle in his office. In later life, Stan took a vow of poverty with no hobbies, no holidays and no salary. “He believed beds are bad for you,” Jeff says.
He says Stan always said that by coming to the mass clinics people had taken the hardest step of all – “asking for help”. “I have great difficulty asking people for help,” Stan says in the documentary. “I’ve always been very bad at that. I didn’t develop personal relationships even when I was growing up in England. All those years I spent alone.
“Family life for me as a child was being seen but not heard. I was born into an underprivileged background several years before the start of WW2. My father had a job with the British government and moved around 26 different places. I was never hugged by my mother or father. They were very disciplined.”
When Stan’s father was deployed to South America, his son was sent to boarding school at Canford in Dorset. “I was one of two or three boys on a full scholarship in the whole school,” Stan says in the film. “They made it hard for people like me. Then one day a boy was denigrating me and my family and I hit him in the face.”
He left the school and, aged 14, took a boat alone all the way to British Guiana (now Guyana) to find his parents. With no prospects, he took a job as a cowboy with the Rupununi Development Company in the Amazon. “I became a Vaquero – a bare-footed cowboy,” he says. “I didn’t see my parents again for many years.”
It was a land of jaguars, anacondas, giant ant eaters, the largest eagle in the world. Stan learned to ride, wrestle snakes and speak Wapishana. “My best friend was Butterball, a horse with no fancy moves,” he says in Paul’s film. “I learned a lot from Butterball.”
Jeff Eastman first came to volunteer at RAM after seeing a 60 Minutes TV documentary on its work. “I volunteered in the lab, assembling glasses,” he says. “For that reason, Stan always seemed to think I was an optician.”
In 2013, Stan asked Jeff to join RAM’s board. When I asked him what he did before RAM, Jeff shook his head and said, “I was a bad man.” He eventually confided he had worked for Philip Morris, the tobacco company. RAM is his way of paying back. Founded when Ronald Reagan was President, RAM has continued through governments of every shade, while maintaining a strict non-partisan affiliation.
The Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – is the closest any US government has ever come to providing healthcare for those most in need, but it has never covered “teeth or eyeballs” as Jeff explains, meaning the queues for treatment never got smaller at RAM events.
President-Elect Trump has said inconsistent things about whether he will overturn Obamacare. In June 2020, his administration asked the US Supreme Court to block the law. In November he wrote on social media that: “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”
Last week in Clinton, 454 volunteers provided more than $275,000 (£211,000) worth of free dental, vision and medical care to 310 people – many putting in 12-hour shifts. Stan Brock was no longer the one welcoming patients, but RAM’s founder looked on from a poster honouring him near the entrance.
“Sometimes people say to me, ‘RAM makes America look bad’,” Jeff Eastman says. “I say, ‘No – RAM makes America look great’.”
