Everyday Hero: Providing Free Health Care for All

If it were up to Dan Bell, no one in this Arkansas resort town in the Ozark Mountains would ever worry about how to pay for health care again. And these days, far fewer need to, thanks to the twice-monthly clinic he and wife Suzie, 57, started in a church gym in November 2005.

Staffed entirely by 200 volunteers from town—hairdressers and secretaries and loan officers work alongside off-duty doctors and nurses—the health center has treated about 1,200 people, many of them uninsured minimum-wage workers who haven’t set foot in a physician’s office in years. “I’d hear about people struggling to afford the doctor, and the next thing you’d know they’d be in the emergency room with some major disease,” says Dan, 59, who has practiced family medicine for 25 years in Eureka Springs.

“This was one thing we could do.” In a region hit hard by a decline in construction and where nearly half of the town’s 2,300 residents lack insurance, the clinic, says Mayor Dani Joy, “fills such a void.”

What makes it work: Everyone has a job. Converting the gymnasium at Faith Christian Family Church into a

walk-in clinic on the second and fourth Thursday of every month, a small army of volunteers takes to its work like a theater crew

setting up a show. Up go partitions to create examination rooms; in comes a mobile EKG and blood-pressure monitors. “We do this out of love for our fellow man,” says Sam, “and we’re all getting something back.”

Source: Oprah’s Heroes in Hard Times, also featured in People Magazine’s Inspirational Heroes