The Buzz About Health Care Reform and Community Health Centers

I have a new post on Erie Family Health Center's Beats per Minute Blog.

Health Care Reform: Where will the newly insured seek health care?

I have a new post on Erie Family Health Center's new blog: Beats per Minute. Enjoy the cross post. I have added Beats per Minute to my blog roll on this page.

Erie Family Health Center in the New York Times!

Proud of this article about Erie Family Health Center's Humboldt Park location which appeared in the New York Times 12/4/09.

Treating a Community's Health Needs That Reform May Not Fix

Chicago News Cooperative reporter James Warren hit the nail on the head. Thanks, Jim!

The Chicago News Cooperative is a new non-profit started with seed money from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It will feed 2 pages of Chicago news in locally printed editions of the New York Times on Fridays and Sundays and will supply high quality local news to other clients in print and over the airwaves.

Federal Stimulus Dollars Flow to Community Health Centers

Federal stimulus dollars have been directed by Congress to community health centers. Health Centers are economic engines that provide hundreds of thousands of health care jobs nation wide as well as stimulus to the economy through purchasing of supplies and equipment.

The American Investment and Recovery Act of 2009 includes (read more):


$2 billion for community health centers. There are over 1,000 community health centers nation wide with over 7,000 service sites. For example, Erie Family Health Center is 1 community health center with 8 service locations.

Included in the $2 billion mentioned above:

$340 million has just been announced for health centers to immediately increase the number of uninsured patients served by hiring more health care workers, increasing hours of operation, and increasing existing health center services. Applications are due on March 16th to compete for these funds.

$155 million has been already awarded to community health centers who applied to launch new sites last year and were not funded. In Illinois, the following community health centers just received $1.3 million each to add a new service site: Lawndale Christian Health Center (Chicago), Lake County Health Department/Community Health Center, Community Health and Emergency Services (Carbondale), and Friend Family Health Center (Chicago, and affiliate of the University of Chicago).

$1.5 billion for construction, renovation, equipment and health information technology systems at the community health center level. We do not yet know how community health centers will be able to compete for these funds. Buildings such as Erie Family Health Center's, Humboldt Park location  (Chicago, pictured above) are in need of state of the art upgrades.

Community health centers are cost effective providers of primary health care. Health centers provide primary care for 17 million individuals in the US, over 1 million in Illinois and over 500,000 in the Chicago metro area. Currently at least 45.7 million Americans are uninsured. This does not count the underinsured and those who are not residents of the US but who are workers and their family members who need health care.

Medically Uninsured Paradoxically Decrease

The reports are in regarding the number of uninsured residents in Illinois and in the US. In 2007, the year of the latest statistics, the number actually went down!

Yes, down.

In Illinois, 13.4% of our fellow friends and neighbors (1.7 million) were uninsured in 2007, down from 14% in 2006. Nationwide, 15.3% were uninsured in 2007 (45.7 million), down from 15.8% in 2006.

Does this mean things are getting better? Maybe. Maybe not. A look at US Census data by Physicians for a National Health Program analysts shows that most of the improvement in health insurance coverage is due to expansions of Medicaid (government coverage for those living in poverty or near poverty) and Medicare (government coverage for senior citizens). Employer provided coverage actually declined another half a percent.

This is mixed news for health centers such as ours. On the one hand, more of the low-income community residents we serve can qualify for Medicaid, especially women and children. On the other hand, working adults are less likely to receive insurance from their employers and are caught in limbo, with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid.

We have made great strides in bringing health care coverage to almost all children in Illinois. The biggest challenge is covering grown-ups. I certainly have my eyes on the successes the Massachusetts system is experiencing (see the New York Times editorial on this).

Death and Health Insurance

This column by Bob Herbert column by Bob Herbert in the NY Times got me thinking about the relationship between health insurance and what physicians write on death certificates. Does lack of health insurance increase the risk of death?

This letter was not published, but 2 by others took a different approach.

November 3, 2007

To the Editor:

Re “Worsening the Odds” (Op-Ed, Nov 3): Bob Herbert describes the unfortunate case of a 45 year old medically uninsured craftsman with progressive headaches who died of metastatic cancer to the brain. He suggests that lack of health insurance contributed to the cause of death.
At our inner-city community health center, 70% of the adults we serve lack health insurance. We commonly see preventable complications of disease.
In Illinois, physicians must enter the official cause of death on the death certificate. On the following two lines physicians may choose to add that the death was “Due to or as a consequence of …” Perhaps we should routinely write “lack of health insurance” or “inability to obtain preventive care” on these lines. By doing so, the role played by this important factor will become an official part of the public record.