It’s 5:30 a.m., and Michael and Lancelot have been sitting on a metal bench in the dark for two and a half hours. At the Beltway Church of Christ in Suitland, Maryland, the two brothers are wrapped in blankets in the December cold; when the sun rises, a faded marble sign will tell us that this patch of grass is called the Fallen Saints Garden. They aren’t homeless, lost, or just very eager to attend church: They’re here to attend a free clinic put on by Remote Area Medical.

RAM is an organization founded in 1985 by Stan Brock, a former actor and ascetic servant of the poor; according to a profile in The Independent in 2014, Brock slept on a “cowboy’s mat inside the offices” of RAM. As the name implies, the organization was founded with the intent to serve inaccessible parts of the world, but it quickly became clear that the need was also severe closer to home. The organization even serves places right outside our nation’s capital—the home of some of the most extravagant and undeserved wealth in America, where Jeff Bezos can buy a $23 million house with 25 bathrooms.



On that bench in the dark, Michael told me he’s employed as a shopper for Amazon—one of thousands of workers who made Jeff Bezos’s Bathroom Versailles possible—but has no health insurance, he said, because he couldn’t afford the premiums. He said he could have opted for health insurance through his job, but a silver plan would have cost him $162 a paycheck, and a gold plan would have been over $200. He lives with Lancelot, his brother, in Springfield, Virginia, about 20 miles away. They took an Uber to get to the clinic. (Approximate cost: $30 each way, roughly what a co-pay might be if they were privately insured.) The two brothers came to the United States from Jamaica 20 years ago and are American citizens. I thought Lancelot, who is currently unemployed, probably ought to qualify for Medicaid. I asked him if he’d ever tried to get on Medicaid, but he said he hasn’t because they “do not know the process.” Would he sign up if he had someone to help him? “Yes,” he said. For now, they are here: on a cold, hard bench 20 miles from home at 5:30 in the morning.



The clinic, which was held over two days last week, made use of several rooms in the church. The triage, medical, and dental checkup teams worked in the cavernous nave, with patients waiting quietly on the pews. A long table on one side of the room held dozens of pairs of glasses, but the clinic also had a lens lab in a truck outside, which could grind lenses to patients’ prescriptions once they had their eyes examined. On the other side of the entrance foyer, several smaller rooms were devoted to eye care or providing dental fillings. This particular clinic was held in partnership with the U.S. Public Health Service, which has a commissioned corps of more than 6,000 public health professionals; approximately 90 of its members staffed this clinic. A total of 222 volunteers checked in to support the clinic over both days, according to RAM.



The clinic coordinator, Vicki Gregg, has worked at RAM for about five years, after a lengthy tenure as a volunteer. She spoke with admiration and at length about Brock, as we discussed the irony of RAM having to serve areas as wealthy as Washington, D.C. Unlike the remote places that inspired RAM’s creation, she said, in America, it’s “a financial border,” not a geographic one, that stops people getting health care. She said RAM has even been asked to go to Martha’s Vineyard—to serve the service workers who prop up that plutocratic aerie. I asked her if the Affordable Care Act had made any difference to the number or needs of patients who showed up; she shook her head.