Housing Alone Won’t Heal New York: Sandy Survivors Need Healthcare, Too

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/housing-alone-wont-heal-new-york-sandy-survivors-need-healthcare-too-0

I gave birth to my second daughter in New York City just before Superstorm Sandy, and carried her home the afternoon it hit. We lay together in my bed, the baby oblivious to the noise, as the darkness fell. For hours I listened to the shrieking darkness, as the flood waters rose just one mile away.

Now my daughter is two years old, and I’m the executive director of a group, Doctors of the World USA, that runs a free medical clinic in the Rockaways, partly as a response to Superstorm Sandy. Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of the contrast between my own healthcare experience amidst the storm, and the pervasive absence of quality healthcare Rockaways residents are still met with each day.

Of course, when we opened the doors of the Rockaways Free Clinic a year ago, we knew things were bad. Superstorm Sandy had devastated this isolated peninsula in Queens. Homes remained in shambles. Many doctors and clinics had yet to resume delivering care.

What’s surprised us over the last year is that people’s needs run even deeper than we’d first thought. The majority of our patients—uninsured and undocumented residents—haven’t seen doctors for ten, twenty, even thirty years. They have layer upon layer of untreated conditions, from diabetes and high blood pressure, to asthma and obesity.