In the documentary Remote Area Medical, a boy chooses a new pair of glasses after receiving an eye exam. Remote Area Medical/Courtesy of Cinedigm hide caption

What happens when you break a leg and you live hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital? Or when you can't afford to get a new pair of glasses because you don't have health insurance?

For many, the answer is to go without help. That's why the organization Remote Area Medical was conceived. As we've reported before, the team travels across the United States and abroad to provide health care to those in need. That's a lot of people about 16 percent of Americans are uninsured, according to the latest Gallup poll.

The plight of those without access to health care is the focus of a new documentary, Remote Area Medical. The film, to be released nationwide on Saturday, follows a team of doctors, dentists and nurses over three days in April 2012 as they treated thousands of people at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee.

Shots spoke to Stan Brock, the founder of Remote Area Medical, about the state of U.S. health care and why his organization isn't going away. This is an edited version of the conversation.

Your charity started out in the upper Amazon. Why did you decide to bring it to the United States?

I got a call from one of the poorest counties in the nation, Hancock County, Tenn. little place called Sneedville which at the time had to close their little hospital and the only dentist in the neighborhood had left town. And so I got a call, "Hey, can you come here and help us out?"

I remember putting a couple of heavy dental chairs that we borrowed in the back of a pickup truck and going up to Sneedville and there was quite a long line of people who needed help. And about a week after that, I got another call from the next county over, and pretty soon we were doing stuff in Tennessee and Kentucky on a regular basis.

And it's just grown from there. So now 90-odd percent of what we do is in the United States. We've done 744 of these special expeditions, as we call them, all over the country: Los Angeles, recently Seattle, and we hoped also in New York but unfortunately, that's not gonna come to pass. So the need is everywhere.

How do you choose which medical specialties to provide?

See more here:

Delivering Health Care To The Uninsured For $15 A Pop