美国国家公共电台 NPR In Rural Alaska, A Young Doctor Walks To His Patient's Bedside（在线收听）

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

And we turn now to Alaska, where providing health care means overcoming a lot of hurdles - fickle weather that can leave patients stranded, for one, and complicated geography. Many Alaskan villages have no roads connecting them with hospitals or with specialists, so people depend on local clinics and devoted primary care doctors. As part of her series Our Land, NPR's Melissa Block followed a young doctor on his weekly visit to a tiny village in Southeast Alaska.

MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: Adam McMahan calls his regular visit to Klukwan the highlight of his week. Along with checking patients' cholesterol or blood sugar, he's just as likely to ask...

ADAM MCMAHAN: Hey, what type of puppy did you get?

LANI HOTCH: A yellow lab.

MCMAHAN: Aw.

BLOCK: Or to a fisherman...

MCMAHAN: Hey, did you find a deckhand?

HENRY CHATONEY: No. I'm going to lease out my permit.

BLOCK: This is the kind of intimate, full-spectrum family medicine the 34-year-old doctor loves.

MCMAHAN: And how often are you sneaking a potato?

EVERETT SIMONS: I eat a half a potato.

MCMAHAN: OK. OK.

BLOCK: Klukwan is a speck of a town alongside the Chilkat River, with snowy mountains looming in the distance. A few hundred people live in and around Klukwan. And over the past three years, since he finished his medical residency, Dr. McMahan has come to know them really well.

MCMAHAN: And I know that Everett, he's amazing potato farmer. I know that Henry is full of adventures and has fished Bristol Bay for longer than I've been alive. And yeah, you get to know your patients as human.

BLOCK: The Klukwan clinic is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC. The staff drive up from the bigger town of Haines 22 miles away. The clinic has two exam rooms, a dental suite, a small lab for basic diagnostics.

MCMAHAN: A lot of it is doing the best we can in the moment with limited resources. I can't send you down the street to go see a cardiologist. I can't get a CT done in 10 minutes.

BLOCK: On the day we visit, Dr. McMahan is seeing mostly elderly patients, including one, an Alaska native elder from the Tlingit tribe, who's bedridden after a stroke. So with stethoscope looped around his neck, the doctor walks down the road to pay her a house call.

MCMAHAN: Hello.

EVELYN HOTCH: Hello.

BLOCK: And the first thing Evelyn Hotch does is offer us a snack.

E. HOTCH: You came to Indian house, and this is what Indians like to eat.

BLOCK: Some dried red seaweed.

E. HOTCH: Everybody take one.

MCMAHAN: What's the Tlingit word for seaweed, for red seaweed?

E. HOTCH: (Speaking Tlingit).

BLOCK: It's only after Dr. McMahan has shared Evelyn's seaweed and asked about her grandchildren that he turns to the medical stuff.

MCMAHAN: I'm going to press on your belly, OK?

E. HOTCH: OK.

BLOCK: The goal with regular primary care like this is to keep people out of the E.R. But in such a small, remote town, what happens in an emergency? Well, there's a volunteer ambulance squad that'll drive up from Haines. That's about a half hour away. But Haines doesn't have a hospital, so critically ill or injured patients might need to be medevaced by Coast Guard helicopter from Haines to Juneau.

MCMAHAN: The vibratory effect of that, when your heart rate's beating fast and you've got a really sick patient, hearing the helicopter, hearing the blades is such a relief.

BLOCK: And even then, they might still need to be flown by air ambulance to bigger hospitals in Anchorage or Seattle hundreds of miles away.

MCMAHAN: The Rubik's Cube of resource coordination and transport is probably one of our biggest challenges.

BLOCK: In part because of these complicated logistics, Alaska has some of the highest health care costs in the country. For people who don't have health insurance, Dr. McMahan says...

MCMAHAN: It's often cause for catastrophe financially.

BLOCK: Have you thought a lot about what would happen if the Affordable Care Act were repealed, replaced?

MCMAHAN: I think if the Medicaid expansion is undercut, people will go without care. They're not going to be able to afford it.

BLOCK: That expansion of Medicaid in Alaska means Dr. McMahan is able to see patients now who had gone years without access to primary care. More than 32,000 Alaskans have gained coverage with the Medicaid expansion. So the current political debate in Congress over health care, even though it's taking place thousands of miles away from Dr. McMahan's clinic, it hits home.

MCMAHAN: It's amazing how politics impact my day-to-day life when it comes to just getting somebody basic care.

BLOCK: For now, though, he turns to his immediate concerns. He's got more patients to see.

MCMAHAN: We'll be with you soon. I've got one patient in front of you, and then...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All right.

MCMAHAN: ...We'll get you right in, OK?

BLOCK: And more stories to hear in Klukwan, Alaska. Melissa Block, NPR News.