This blog post originally appeared at ReportingonHealth.org, an online community at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Anna Gorman, senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, T.H.E. therapist Neil Martin, T.H.E. outreach manager MelbaDenise Donnell, and Dr. Derrick Butler, a physician at the clinic. | Ryan White

A visit to the To Help Everyone Health and Wellness Center in South Los Angeles offers a very different perspective on what health reform means at the ground level, at least compared to the typical media diet of enrollment updates and website glitches.

Many of the clinic’s predominantly poor, African-American patients are dealing with multiple chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and H.I.V. That’s on top of unusually high levels of mental health disorders, drug abuse, alcoholism, crushing poverty and unhealthy diets. Dr. Derrick Butler, responsible for managing many of the clinic’s toughest cases, affectionately referred to some of his patients as “train wrecks” when speaking to a group of journalists at the 2014 California Health Journalism Fellowship visiting the clinic recently. [Read more…]