Death Watch for Health Clinics
The Mary Howard Health Center sits on the first floor of a ten-story, low-rise office building a few blocks from the heart of downtown Philadelphia. The center serves the city’s homeless residents, providing everything from wound care to mental-health services. Like all community health centers, Mary Howard provides health care without regard for income or insurance status.
‘They’re doing a good job, giving me all the attention I need,’ says James Brown (‘like the soul singer’), a 71-year-old Mary Howard patient with a painful abscess on his back the size of a fist. ‘It’s just like a regular hospital.’
The center saw 1,760 patients last year, a capacity increased by funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA) $2 billion earmark for community health centers. Most of the $636,000 ARRA grant Mary Howard received went to expanding the center’s capacity from four to ten patient rooms.
Without Mary Howard, Brown says, ‘I would have just gone to emergency care … but I trust [the health center] just as much as emergency care.’
The nation’s 8,000 community health centers—nonprofit organizations that provide primary care to medically underserved areas and populations—serve more than 20 million patients a year, about half in rural areas. They do this at under half the cost of emergency rooms (where the uninsured might otherwise receive treatment), which is why they were a key component of the Obama administration’s health-care reform law.
In addition to receiving a boost from the economic stimulus, the Affordable Care Act included $11.5 billion over five years for expanding community health centers nationwide, largely for the reasons highlighted by Brown’s case: When they are run well, health centers provide comprehensive medical coverage to those who wouldn’t otherwise receive it, at a cost savings of $24 billion per year. Advocates and policy-makers argue that an expanded health-center network could accommodate the needs of the tens of millions of newly insured Americans, including Americans newly eligible for Medicaid under the health-care law….