Eye Care

After a month of wartime unity and stifled dissent, Democrats are charting a careful course toward challenging a now-formidable President and his party for control of Congress next year and for the White House in 2004. For the foreseeable future, they will support President Bush's stewardship of the war on terrorism. But they will slowly start reminding voters that just as the government fights to safeguard their lives, it also should fight to safeguard their livelihoods, preferably with Democratic ideas.

Calvin M. Dubrow, 58, of Blue Bell, an ophthalmologist who made house calls and performed eye surgery on patients from around the world, died of complications from heart surgery Wednesday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He had lived in Blue Bell for last four years and was a Montgomery County resident for more than 30 years. Dr. Dubrow was raised in the Mount Airy section of the city and graduated from Central High School in 1960. He was a graduate of La Salle University and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

It is said the eye is the window to the soul. It is also the window to the body, ophthalmologist Leonard Ginsburg said. By looking into eyes, Ginsburg said, he has diagnosed problems such as diabetes and impotency. He said that his new eye hospital would be well-positioned to care not just for the eyes, but for the whole body as well. The Moore Eye Institute is scheduled to open formally June 9 at the Crozer-Keystone Healthplex on Route 320, although it has been accepting patients since February.

In a sign of the turmoil roiling health care, a group of optometrists left their offices yesterday and took to the sidewalk to protest a new Independence Blue Cross payment plan that they say will cut their pay and diminish patient care. Singing "solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong," and other traditional labor anthems, about 50 optometrists and supporters marched and shouted slogans for more than 90 minutes outside Blue Cross headquarters in the 1900 block of Market Street.

There could very well be Bolivian peasants high in the Andes Mountains wearing 1950s-style rhinestone-studded eyeglasses. And it would be because of the Laurel Springs Lions Club. For the last three months, the Laurel Springs Lions have been working with a Maryknoll missionary in Bolivia, a nonprofit aid organization based in North Carolina, an eye doctor in Somerdale, and a native Bolivian living in Pine Hill to provide eye care for 800,000 rural Bolivians. And a big part of that eye care involves collecting old eyeglasses from South Jersey residents and out-of-style glasses donated by stores - and shipping them to Bolivia.

Esta en su casa. You're at home. That's how you feel the moment you enter Rafael Collazo's office in the Medical Arts Building of Episcopal Hospital. At home. The waiting room banter rises and falls in the kinetic rhythms of Spanish. The magazine racks are stacked with copies of Salud y Belleza (Health and Beauty magazine). The walls are decorated with posters celebrating the Three Kings Day Parade and the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in Puerto Rico. Here, you instantly sense that the first question won't be: "Do you speak English?"

You may not have heard of Orbis International, but it's probably the most dynamic example of peacetime flying the world has ever known. Orbis (from the Greek term for "around the world") is an international partnership of 350 skilled, experienced and volunteer medical personnel who fly aboard a specially equipped DC-10, delivering eye care, treatment and restoration of eyesight throughout the world. The plane is equipped with a classroom, an audiovisual room, a laser room and a conference room.

For decades, public school teachers have climbed the rungs of a salary ladder built according to some simple arithmetic: Add up years of experience, figure in extra college credits and award a wage increase. This one-plan-fits-all approach is known as "the single-salary structure," said William Firestone, an expert on education policy at Rutgers University. Among its virtues, in the view of teachers, is its fair dealing. In the years before unionization, high school teachers generally earned more than elementary teachers; men more than women; white people more than black people and other minorities.

Former city employees who lost health insurance for their children when the Rendell administration privatized the Philadelphia Nursing Home may soon get help from a program that provides insurance for the working poor. The Caring Foundation, which runs state and privately funded programs to provide childrens health insurance, set up an information booth at the nursing home Friday and handed out applications to 32 working parents. "This could help a lot of people," said Barbara Burrus, 40, a nursing aide, who hopes to get insurance for her 14 year-old daughter.

If all goes as planned, the empty Allstate Insurance building, Route 70 will be a center for eye and hand surgery within a year. Wills Eye Hospital is seeking to start an outpatient clinic in that space, hoping to attract many of the 3,700 patients who now travel across the river to the hospital's Philadelphia headquarters. At a meeting before a committee of the New Jersey Health Department's Local Advisory Board on Wednesday, two doctors from Wills Eye, including its chief of ophthalmology, came to lobby for the project.