Re: Feel Good Story Of The Day: Russell Dohner, doctor for 57 years still only charge 5.00


Russell Dohner, Illinois Doctor, Charges Patients $5 For Entire Physician Visit

The Huffington Post | By Khadeeja Safdar Posted: 06/25/2012 3:58 pm Updated: 06/25/2012 4:26 pm


Dr. Russell Dohner has been treating Rushville residents for about 60 years, while never charging more than $5 per visit.

While the rest of the country awaits the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act and the future of health care costs, the residents of Rushville, Ill., are less worried about the cost of a visit to the doctor.
Russell Dohner, the town's doctor since 1955, charges his patients just $5 -- not for a co-pay but for the entire cost of a physician's visit, according to KSDK News. The low price isn't the only thing at Dohner's office that's remained constant for decades. The office hasn't been remodeled, nurses haven't been replaced and staff members haven't ditched their old-school method of writing medical records on index cards in favor of more modern technology.
Considered a local hero, the 87-year-old Dohner keeps his clinic open seven days a week.
In 57 years of practicing medicine, he's never taken a vacation, KSDK News reports.
The $5 physician visit charge has been in place since the 1970s. Before that, he charged $2 per visit.
The Illinois doctor, a graduate of Northwestern University Medical School, is offering a huge service to his town in the current economic climate. Medical costs, which rose 6 percent nationwide in the past year, are taking a heavy toll on American households. A family of four with an employment-based insurance plan can expect to pay $20,000 -- or about 40 percent of median household income -- on medical expenses this year.
Across the country, the financial burden of rising medical costs has many Americans scaling back on physician visits and medications. More than 80 percent of the uninsured reportedly skimp on necessary health care.
But thanks to Dr. Dohner, the uninsured residents of Rushville have a place to get much-needed medical treatment.

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When Russell Dohner was a boy, he had a terrifying bout of seizures.

"When I came out of them," he tells PEOPLE, "there would always be [our physician] Dr. Hamilton. I decided I wanted to be like him."

After medical school, he hung out a shingle in the next county over. His fee: $2.

That was in 1955. And while times have changed, Dr. Dohner hasn't.

He still sees patients seven days a week out of the same office, keeps handwritten records with the help of his longtime nurse, Florence Bottorff, 88, and has been charging patients $5 a visit since the '70s.

"That's the way I've always done it," says the gentlemanly bachelor. "There are quite a few people who come to see me because they can't afford anybody else. I can help."

For that, a town is grateful. Dr. Dohner works for his patients, and for love.


Rushville, Ill., is the kind of place where backyards have gardens instead of grass, and sunflowers wave in the wind. A tiny town, just 4,300 people, named for a doctor and settled by the men who marched back from the War of 1812. Rushville was built on government land, halfway between St. Louis and Chicago, as a gift to veterans. Those who did not come back got a statue on the courthouse square and were called heroes. “In a mercenary world,” a waiting patient told me, “this place is an oasis.” But there is another sort of hero in Rushville today — one the town treasures, and can also touch. Dr. Russell Dohner has been looking after his neighbors for 55 years, charging them about what we pay for a fancy cup of coffee: five bucks a visit. Making a difference

Dohner doesn’t believe in tossing things away, and that keeps costs down. The only thing modern in his office is medicine. Most of his nurses have been with him nearly as long as his furniture. They’re paid well because Doc works around the clock.


He will go anywhere, at any time, to help those in need, often arriving before emergency crews. He once saved a small boy from smothering to death in a corncrib, once climbed down into a coal mine to help rescue four men. Dohner broke his own back a few years ago and has had a heart attack — the only times he’s ever closed his clinic. He took time off until patients started coming to his house seeking medical care.

He does have help. Doc brought half the Rushville hospital staff into the world, including the woman who runs the place, Lynn Stambaugh. She used to wash dishes at the hospital. Dohner inspired her to go to nursing school. I asked her why Doc never burned out. "Well, I think because every day he makes a difference to at least one person, and if you can do that, you can go on.”The morning we first met, back in 1983, Dohner had been to surgery twice, prepped a broken arm, handled two emergency cases, checked on 50 patients and delivered three babies. It was not yet 10:30.No days off

He has only one hobby: trees. He’s donated 10,000 of them to this prairie town. Now and then he does slip away to go fishing on a Thursday afternoon, but he’s usually in his tie, and always near a phone. He has not, in 55 years, had a vacation, not even a full day off. What would he do, if he did take a day off?“I would like to go to Missouri,” Doc says. Missouri is only 58 miles west of Rushville.“Yes, but I have to take care of my patients first.”The last time Doc left Illinois was during World War II. He was a military policeman in the Army, guarding President Harry Truman. “I was close enough to touch him,” Doc smiles, “but he wouldn’t have liked that.”Dr. Dohner was born 85 years ago on a nearby farm, one of seven children. He worked to pay his own way through Northwestern University medical school. He had his heart set on being a big-city cardiologist, but decided, “Rushville needed a doctor, so I stayed. It’s the way it’s got to be, if I take care of what comes.” Russell Dohner has won dozens of awards for the quality of his practice and was runner-up for Country Doctor of the Year. Every morning before the sun peeks over the water tower, dozens of people are crammed into his waiting room. He takes no appointments. Those who are seriously ill use the back door to get immediate attention; others sit for an hour or more to visit a doctor who knows more about them than some of their families do. The first baby he delivered now drives her granddaughter 30 miles for an office visit. “When your little girl gets carried to surgery by the doctor instead of one of the nurses, she will learn to trust him, too,” she said. docc has no children of his own — unless you count the 3,500 babies he’s delivered. That’s more than the population of Rushville.


Russell Dohner, Illinois Doctor, Charges Patients $5 For ... www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/russell-dohner-5-dollar-doctor-visit_n_16...

What does he live on? Barter?

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