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Some Dental Relief for Appalachia's Poorest in a Town Named Grundy Read more: to.pbs.org GRUNDY, Va. -- It felt like a sustained jackhammer to the jaw. A pounding, pulsing dental pain that started as a dull ache in some rotten teeth and eventually spread to Bobby Horn's entire mouth. "It was probably six to seven years ago they really just started breaking off - some of them even below the gum line," he said. "Worst pain of my life." But like nearly half of Americans, Bobby Horn had no dental insurance and few options. So one night in early October, Horn drove to the yearly Remote Area Medical clinic in the small Appalachian town of Grundy. There, in an elementary school parking lot, he joined nearly a thousand uninsured residents of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky hoping to get some free care. Horn - profiled in the video above - had 21 of his teeth pulled. But those were nothing compared with the 900 extracted from the crowd during the two-day clinic. In this southwest corner of Virginia, there are only three certified dentists for a population of 24000. As former NewsHour Correspondent Susan Dentzer reported in 2006 from a sister clinic in nearby Wise County, "a visit here offers one grim window onto the state of health care in America." And the desperation has only gotten worse since the economic collapse in 2008. It's a dental crisis that's become the status quo these days - and not just in Appalachia. "If you blindfold yourself and throw a dart at a map of Virginia, I guarantee you that you'd find the exact same problems there ... From: PBSNewsHour Views: 194 3 ratings Time: 04:26 More in News & Politics