Dr. 'Patch' Adams visits Champaign

Dressed in a brightly colored clown suit with big, colorful shoes, a chicken hat on his head and a clown nose, Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams entered the Orpheum Children's Science Museum to the playful sound of an accordian.

"The way he walked into the place was the way you would've expected," said Audrey Adams, junior in LAS. "He immediately looked at one of the kids."

Adams visited the Orpheum in Champaign on Saturday for an hour of play with the children and to promote the Health Care Design Intensive, a four-day international conference in health care system design being held Oct. 11-14 in Urbana.

"All over the world health care is deteriorating," Adams said.

Adams is founder and director of the Gesundheit! Institute in Arlington, Va. According to his Web site, patchadams.org, the Gesundheit! Institute opened in 1971 and is a medical community that provides free medical care to its patients. Adams said it is humiliating that his profession refuses to care for people without health care.

According to patchadams.org, Adams "believes laughter, joy and creativity are an integral part of the healing process and therefore true health care must incorporate such life." He has devoted his life to the study of what makes people happy.

At the Orpheum, Adams said he thinks the U.S. government should be spending its money to provide health care to every person in the world. Adams said he thinks the government is wasting money on the war in Iraq.

"A government that takes care of everybody is of value to everybody," he said.

Adams also said he thinks the U.S., as the richest country in the world, should provide health care not only to American citizens who do not have it, but to all the citizens of the world.

Sherilyn Johns, of Dayton, Ohio, was visiting her daughter and son-in-law in Champaign and decided to bring her three-year-old grandson to see Adams. She said she agrees with his views on health care and thinks it is too expensive.

"We have a responsibility to take care of each other," Johns said.

Melanie Meltzer, a 19-year-old student at The School for Designing a Society and a member of the Gesundheit! Institute, agrees that there needs to be a better health care plan for the world. She said right now, profit is more important than care in the health care system, and people need to change that by designing a different system for the future.