JASON CHERKIS
KENTUCKY’S
KING
as a restaurant manager’s daughter who began waitressing at age
9 and never finished high school.
She spent decades behind dimly
lit bars and truck-stop cash registers. When she realized that she
couldn’t see the poker machines
from the bar, a doctor told her
she had diabetes. She didn’t have
health insurance. If she ran out of
insulin before payday, she had to
hope her body wouldn’t miss it.
Sometimes she woke up in hospital beds.
While she was working at a
truck stop in Livingston, a coworker found her naked on a bed
in the motel where she lived. She’d
fallen into a diabetic coma.
McConnell’s earmarks never
shone their short-term hope on
Calladine. Somewhere, maybe a
county away, they found some
other down-on-their-luck souls
and taught them about turkey bacon or pulled a dead tooth from
their rotting gums. But the senator
never chose what his state truly
required: comprehensive solutions
to, instead of temporary patches
over, the gaping holes in Kentucky’s health care system.
Obamacare has its own shortcomings for Kentucky. It will not
address the chronic shortage of
HUFFINGTON
08.11.13
doctors in rural areas or the lack
of doctors who accept poor patients. But it will at least grapple
with the statewide crisis in accessing health insurance.
After returning to Lincoln County and finding the Hope Clinic, Calladine says, she has been able to
get a handle on her diabetes and a
recently discovered thyroid condition. The rest of her care must
wait, however — even emergencies.
Three weeks earlier, Calladine
fell and fractured her ankle. But
the emergency room is only free
with a referral from the clinic, and
her next appointment at Hope
wasn’t for two days. So she had no
choice but to wait, sit out the pain
and watch her ankle swell. “If it
got any fatter, it felt like it was going to bust,” she said.
Sheila
Calladine, 63,
and her dog,
outside the
school bus
in which she
lives.