A Mobile Clinic Parked At A Dollar General? It Says A Lot About Rural Health Care: NPR 🚐
- NPR, Oct. 5, 2023. - Ed.
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — On a hot July morning, customers at the Dollar General along a two-lane highway northwest of Nashville didn't seem to notice signs of the chain store's foray into mobile health care. A woman lifted a child from the back of an SUV and walked into the store. A dog barked from a black pickup truck before its owner returned with cases of soda. Another woman checked her hair in a convertible's rearview mirror before shopping.
Without a passing glance , each went right by a sign exclaiming "Quick, Easy Health Visits," with an image of a mobile clinic.
Just after 10 a.m., registered nurse Kimberly French arrived to work at the DocGo mobile clinic parked in the store's lot. She checked her schedule. "We don't have any appointments so far today, but that could change," French says. "Last night we didn't have any appointments and three or four people showed up all at one time."
Dollar General, the nation's largest retailer by number of stores, with more than 19,000 locations, partnered with a New York-based mobile medical services company called DocGo to test whether it could draw more customers and tackle persistent health inequities. Deploying mobile clinics to fill care gaps in underserved areas isn't a new idea. But pairing them with Dollar General's ubiquitous small-town presence has been heralded by investment analysts and some rural health experts as a way to ease the rural health care drought.
Where doctors are scarce: Dollar General's latest annual report notes that about 80% of the company's stores are in towns with populations of fewer than 20,000 — precisely where medical professionals are scarce. Catering to those who want urgent or primary care, the mobile clinics take private insurance as well as Medicaid and Medicare. The company's website says DocGo's self-pay rates start at $69 for patients without insurance or who are out of network..
On the ground in Tennessee, primary care doctors and patients are skeptical...🥼
More, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/05/1202188258/dollar-general-rural-primary-care-docgo
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hat tip, The Wall Street Journal.
Leon Levine, Who Made Small Box Retailing Pay, Dies at 85
Founder of Family Dollar put cut-price stores in poor neighborhoods
By James R. Hagerty
April 12, 2023 9:59 am ET
{paywall}
He created the discount chain retailer Family Dollar, which found success, and criticism, by catering to the poor.
Leon Levine opened his first store with an investment of $6,000. By the time he retired, he had created a thriving chain and a billion-dollar fortune. via Leon Levine Foundation
By Alex Traub
April 19, 2023
Leon Levine, the founder of Family Dollar, a chain retailer that shaped the daily lives of the nation’s poor, died on April 5 at his home in Charlotte, N.C. He was 85. ... His son, Howard, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. ... In 1959, with $3,000 of his own money and $3,000 from a partner, Mr. Levine opened the first Family Dollar on Central Avenue in Charlotte. ... In 2015, a competitor, Dollar Tree, acquired Family Dollar for nearly $9 billion in cash and stocks. That year, Mr. Levine’s family fortune amounted to $1.4 billion, according to Forbes. Howard Levine, who in 2003 succeeded his father as chairman of Family Dollar, stepped down in 2016.
There are about 8,000 Family Dollar locations nationwide. By contrast, there were 3,572 Walmart “supercenters” in the United States as of the beginning of this year. ... Family Dollar stores sell, at the cheapest possible prices, an encyclopedic array of domestic necessities and comforts, among them detergent, winter coats, party napkins, pet food, wireless speakers, rakes, strollers, wind chimes and 95-cent cans of Vienna sausage. The stores are relatively small, generally under 10,000 square feet, and locations across the country place the same merchandise in the same spots under the same fluorescent lighting.
By 1982, there were 500 Family Dollar stores. Two years later, there were 1,000. The chain expanded from the South to major metropolitan centers nationwide. via Leon Levine Foundation
From its early years, Mr. Levine’s stores have catered to poor people. He often told interviewers that he picked their locations by looking for oil stains in parking lots, which he thought signified the leaky cars of the poor.
He continued visiting one of his stores every other day until his 15th opened, in the 1960s. He was shocked when, in 1970, a New York brokerage company approached him about going public. He quickly did. ... “I opened my first store with $6,000,” Mr. Levine told The New York Times in 2011. “For 10 years I didn’t come up for air; I had no idea how much money I had.”
{snip}
Meanwhile, Cuba is the enemy. 
I visit my family often, freely and unfettered, using the extra privileges Cuban-Americans get, whereas Americans need special approval.
Health care in Cuba is very good. Do they have lots of leading-edge modern equipment? No. Because the US's cruel extraterritorial sanctions limit Cuba's Ministry of Health from purchasing said equipment. This is huge.
Because of this, Cuba responded with health care focusing on more preventing mal-health, starting at a young age.
Bravo to you for recognizing the points in your post. 
