Barre, VT – The People’s Health & Wellness Clinic (PHWC) has been selected as a beneficiary of the Shaw’s GIVE BACK WHERE IT COUNTS Reusable Bag Program for the month of February 2023.

John LePage started his journey toward the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic in Barre decades ago, at the age of 19, after a serious injury while living in New York City. The Barre native returned home and got a part-time job in the “one man ‘ElectroNeuroDiagnostics’ department at our local hospital right here in Berlin.” 

He started on a part-time basis — three half-days per week — while recovering from the injury and enduring housing insecurity, transportation challenges, hunger, and lots of pain, he said. 

But “10,000 patients and 17 years later, insurmountable health issues propelled me into the world of the unemployed and the uninsured,” he wrote in an email to The Bridge. “Unable to make my mortgage payments, I was forced back into the elements. May through September weren’t too bad. Living cold and hungry, October through April was Hell.”

I thank The Bridge for Cassandra Hemenway’s article about the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic, “The Game Changer: Health Care Even if You Can’t Afford It” (Dec. 21, 2022). As a healthcare activist and a friend of Dan Barlow, the clinic’s executive director, who has worked with him on healthcare issues, I know there is none better to lead this vitally important feature of our healthcare landscape. The clinic is one of the few that cares for those forgotten by our mysterious reliance on and reverence for the aptly misnamed “free market.”