The Moss Free Clinic is a well-known charity in Fredericksburg, and Dr. Moss a herald of a bygone era of personal visits and personal touch.
Dr. Moss passed away Monday at the age of 90, but his legacy lives on:
The Moss Free Clinic gave older doctors like himself a chance to continue that intimate style of medicine, increasingly threatened by government entitlement bureaucracies, HMOs, liability suits, and other harpies of modernity. Meanwhile, younger doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health-care experts could, as volunteers, enjoy a respite from medicine-as-business and revel in medicine-as-calling. Nearly 400 such professionals now pitch in at the clinic, which last year served some 1,400 patients–most decent, hardworking people not old enough for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid, and not lucky enough to carry employer-provided health insurance.
Now I never had an occasion to visit the Moss Clinic, but I know plenty of folks who did. What’s more, I don’t know of many places in Virginia that offer the same type of volunteered service to their community.