Dr. Karen Kinsell offers her brand of health care to region's poorest poor

FORT GAINES — Suggestion to the PC Police and their minions: You're not going to convert Dr. Karen Kinsell, so don't waste your — or her — time.

A dedicated physician who has been interviewed by media as disparate as The New Yorker, PBS and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Kinsell not only marches to the beat of a different drummer, she only agrees to march when it suits her or her patients' purpose.

She refers to herself by a nickname she says she got when she came South from New York City — DYB ... damn Yankee bitch — and refuses to mince words when she talks about things in the local and state health care systems that irk her, i.e. state officials' refusal to expand Medicaid; Federally Qualified Health Center's that were created to offer care for people who don't have enough money to pay for services; mid-level caregivers that "don't know sh— but are making life-or-death decisions," and anyone else who deems themselves qualified to tell her what to do.

To wit:

"Georgia officials don't expand Medicaid because it's got Obama's name attached to it." ... "We should be focusing on helping the people most in need, but the state officials won't abandon (Gov. Brian) Kemp's program that has been a complete failure because they're worried about embarrassing him." ... "It sounds like a made-up joke, it's so ludicrous. The state could be bringing in a ton of money and helping a lot of people by doing this one thing that 40 other states in the nation have done." ... "I enjoy working in an environment where there's no one else telling me what to do."

And, referring to the health care situation in Clay County, one of the poorest county's among Georgia's 159, Kinsell says, "This is like the Peace Corps ... but there's cable and WiFi."

Kinsell was recently featured on a PBS documentary, "The Only Doctor, available at https://www.pbs.org/video/the-only-doctor-bcr04c. In it she talks about the lack of health care in the region.

She's no stranger to such attention.

"I really don't like to deal with haters," she said during a conversation at the Fort Gaines office she bought so that she could help patients in a county so poor it's the only one in Georgia that does not have a high school. "I'm actually an introvert and don't like to socialize. The publicity aspect of all of this is mortifying.

"But Monty Veazy (the president/CEO of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals) got the word out he was looking for a rural doctor with a close connection with the public, and (state senator) Freddie Powell Sims told him about me. I was on a PBS broadcast, and then this lazy reporter from The New Yorker was looking for a physician that checked off certain boxes, and he interviewed me and wrote some stream-of-consciousness articles. You can be assured, I am not, nor will I ever be, looking for publicity."

Still going strong at age 69, even though long COVID has her hooked up to an oxygen tank — a simple walk down the hallway of her office to welcome patients leaves her struggling for breath — Kinsell made several stops along the way in her long, strange trip to southwest Georgia.

She grew up in, of all places, rural Indiana and left for Milwaukee to study Pre-med. She was the only person in her graduating class who left the state to continue her education. But she didn't finish the requirements for a degree, moving instead to New York's Upper East Side. There, she spent the next several years working with the homeless at various shelters.

"I encountered so many people living on the sidewalk," she said. "We helped some of them get space in drop-in centers when gentrification started and officials started trying to move them out. People cooked their food on hot plates ... and there are just so many times you can hear the fire alarms blaring before you say 'enough.'"

At 34, Kinsell made the decision to return to her initial quest, enrolling the prestigious Columbia School of Medicine.

"As you might guess, I didn't really mesh with those 20-year-old Ivy League grads," she said.

Kinsell worked at a medical center in the Bronx, but decided she'd had enough when a man was shot and killed in the store below the center.

"I started looking (for jobs) in areas of the country that I thought were in need, areas like where I grew up: the Midwest and the South," she said.

Kinsell's search led her to Albany, and after interviewing with several officials in the health care industry, she decided "this is a good place."

After arriving in southwest Georgia, she quickly learned that the establishment was not exactly enamored with this DYB who came south with her own ideas of how health care should be administered. She worked with several health care agencies in the region before deciding to open her own practice in an area that had a great need.

Unlike other facilities in the area whose signage boasted "Ask About Our Discount Plan" — "What a joke that was," Kinsell said — she offered care at a rate of $10 a visit.

"But even if they don't have the money, I treat them," she said. "I sincerely believe people have a right to health care. But there's just so much money being made off the poor, people who often don't have enough money to pay for even a visit, much less care ... if they can even get to a health care facility. Many of them don't have the transportation to get to a doctor's office, and some of them can get a ride there but don't have a way home.

"It's difficult for people living here in no man's land. I just kind of learned to do medicine cheaply. What most of these places around here don't get is that it doesn't do people much good to make a diagnosis if they can't afford to buy medicine."

Despite her struggle with long COVID, Kinsell — who says she plans to continue her practice until she's 75 and proved her capacity to do so by working as many as nine part-time health care jobs during COVID — is living the kind of life that draws people to her. She's served on the Fort Gaines School Board and is now on its City Council. She's also using funds from a recent inheritance to buy up dilapidated housing to fix up.

"Forty-three percent of the housing in Fort Gaines is empty," she said. "Due to a recent inheritance, I have more money now than I need in my lifetime. I am buying these houses to fix them up. That's the only way we're going to get people to move here.

"With our beautiful lake and location, we should be sitting pretty with people wanting to move here. But we can't attract new people or new businesses unless we have suitable housing for them."

The people who know Kinsell only from things they've heard about her or from an abrupt run-in think her "quirky" or "odd." She is, after all, a DYB. But the people she treats have a different opinion.

"Dr. Kinsell is great," Sammie Hudley of Cuthbert, who has been seeing Kinsell for her health care needs for "more than 20 years," said. "I just came in today for my regular checkup, but she's really taken care of me over the years. She's a good doctor, explains things, really cares about her patients."

That's a "different" drum more should march to.