It was not perhaps the most obvious way of getting a bad back, arthritis and a dodgy foot seen to. But if you're unemployed in North Carolina with no health insurance, there is no obvious way.

So on 9 June James Verone left his Gastonia home, took a ride to a bank and carried out a robbery. Well, sort of.

What he did was hand the clerk a note that said: "This is a bank robbery, please only give me one dollar." Then, as he later told the local NBC news station, he calmly sat in the corner of the bank having told the clerk: "I'll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police."

Before his peculiarly modest robbery, Verone, 59, sent a letter to the Gaston Gazette. "When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."

He invited the paper to send a reporter to interview him in Gaston county jail, where he is now in custody facing charges of stealing from a person (for just $1 the prosecutors didn't think they could hold up a bank robbery charge).

He told the paper he had lost his job after 17 years as a Coca-Cola delivery man, and with it his health insurance. He was in increasing pain from slipped discs, arthritic joints, a gammy foot and a growth on his chest.

Since being in the jail he has attained his goal: he has been seen by nurses and an appointment with a doctor is booked.

its a sad state of affairs for a rich nation as the USA to be in

Isn't it just, and yet when their politicians talk about quite modest health care reform the voters are revolting...

(edited) how are you supposed to make an educated decision?

Isn't it just, and yet when their politicians talk about quite modest health care reform the voters are revolting...

I wonder how long before Tory reforms mean that we have to do that here?

you will not have to wait that long, next year maybe ...

If they dare take away our "free at source" NHS then even I will get off my fat lazy backside and show them how revolting I can be...

i like 'thinking' outside of the box
its a sad state of affairs for a rich nation as the USA to be in
but well done that man ...

Because they're told a pack of lies by a media so predominantly and vehemently right wing that 'publicly funded' is about as acceptable as 'make your daughter have sex with a donkey'.

Seriously - these are the people that said that in the UK you can't get treatment for cancer at all and, most hilariously, that if Stephen Hawking lived in the UK he'd have died years ago. If that's all the information you're getting, how are you supposed to make an educated decision?

Jon

True, they pretty much say that a public health system = socialism = Russia... That is a sure way to get any reform killed off.