Having health insurance is not guaranteed if you live in the United States. Instead, employers can provide their employees with health insurance if they are full-time employees. A full-time employee is one who works 40 or more hours per week and has applied for the company’s benefit package. There are thousands of people who own their own business or who work for themselves, which means that no one provides them with health insurance. If this is the case, health insurance can be purchased from health insurance companies in each individual state. Some people in this country can get lucky and visit a doctor who will continue to treat the patient even if they lose medical coverage while in the care of the doctor. There is one such doctor in this country who performs this charity and has been nationally recognized for his work.
The doctor’s name is Pedro Jose Greer, who works at Miami’s Mercy Hospital. Greer is a gastroenterologist, who is known to his patients as Doctor Joe, tells his patients that if they do not have medical coverage it is no big deal no matter what the cost of their procedure is when in his care. “When did it become acceptable in my profession,” says the 53-year-old physician, “to say ‘No’ to somebody because they have no money?” This attitude has led Greer to be honored with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was awarded this honor back in August because he cares for the poor with dignity and respect.
Some of the highlights of Greer’s career include the following:
- Greer founded the Camillus Health Concern in 1984, which is a Miami clinic that provides health care to 10,000 homeless and low income patients on an annual basis
- Greer founded the St. John Bosco clinic in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood to treat low income and immigrant patients
- Greer was recently named the assistant dean of academic affairs at Florida International University’s new medical school
Greer was born in 1956 in a Miami hospital, Jackson Memorial, after only 6.5 months of pregnancy. The doctor who treated Greer’s mother thought she was crazy and was not going into labor but she wound up giving birth to Greer only three hours later on a gurney in the hospital. Greer and his mother returned to Cuba only a couple of weeks later but returned to the United States in 1959 after Fidel Castro took over. Greer grew up in Cuban Miami and went to Roman Catholic schools during his educational career. Greer earned his medicine degree at a Catholic university in the Dominican Republic and then returned to Miami to begin treating the poor, low income, and homeless of Miami.
In a book published by Greer in 1999, titled “Waking up in America,” he said “In America it seemed as if we didn’t care if you suffered, but if you were about to die, we’d scramble to save you at (the hospital) — and then send you back to suffer, to the streets.”