Sione Alipate (name changed for privacy) has been a patient of mine since I started practice nearly twenty years ago.  Before that he was a patient of my predecessor.  His chart goes back to 1970, at least.

cross-posted on The DailyKos at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/14/154550/702/88/705720

He is now seventy years old, a retired food handler for Sky Chefs, who immigrated to the United States over forty years ago from the island nation of Tonga.  At my urging he recently became an American citizen and voted, with great pride, in his first presidential election.

He is a strong but gentle and soft-spoken man.  But last week he was near tears in my office as he and I discovered that the choices he had been offered for his health insurance coverage meant he might no longer be able to keep me as his primary care physician.