Former President Jimmy Carter continues to be a shining beacon for us all. For nearly 35 years, Carter and former first lady Rosalyn Carter have been working with Habitat for Humanity to build homes not just across the nation, but around the world. The pair worked through their nonprofit Carter Center and teamed up with the Centers for Disease Control on a 30-year effort to eradicate the Guinea worm disease. In the mid-1980s, 3.5 million people were affected by the disease and by the year 2016, there were only two known cases in the entire world.
But Carter has not forgotten the struggling residents of his home state, where rural Georgia residents struggle to find health care. Six rural hospitals have closed their doors in Georgia since 2013. In a bright spot of good news, the Mercer University School of Medicine has announced it will be opening a primary clinic in Plains, Georgia, where former President Carter is said to have been involved with the push to bring health care back to the area. From The Telegraph:
Sumner said that Carter, a Mercer trustee, called the university’s president and talked about the need for health care in the town. Carter “was very involved,’’ Sumner said. “He opened the door.”
Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, recently met with representatives of Mercer and of the Waycross-based Global Partnership for Telehealth, which will supply telehealth services at the clinic.
The new clinic will have a physician and a nurse practitioner, and it will help train Mercer medical students.
“Mercer is committed to rural health,’’ Sumner said. Southwest and southeast Georgia have few health care resources, she added.
Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter are the incredible gifts that keep on giving. Has any other former president gone on to give the world so much after leaving office? How thoughtful of him to fight for health care access in the place where he was born. After all, when Carter was born in 1924, he was the first future U.S. president to be born in a hospital!
