Community Health Centers Receive $338 Million

U.S. HHS announced on March 27th, 2009 that they have released $338 million to expand Community Health Centers which is supposed to save jobs and enable them to serve more uninsured patients. For the full article see: http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2009pres/03/20090327a.html

The total amount that is distributed to Community Health Centers in North Carolina is $8,636,285 to be divided into 27 grants. This money is projected to provide funding for 154 new or retained jobs. It is supposed to pay for the medical care for 41,288 new patients and 26,889 new uninsured patients. To see the breakdown of funding per state see: http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/hrsa/idsgawards.html

While this is a step in the right direction and will, hopefully, help employees and patients, there is still much to be done to secure affordable quality health care for everyone and to decrease our state average unemployment rate of 10.7%. This is a band-aid on a very broken system of health care un-affordability and inequality. It will be interesting to see how the money is actually being spent and if any patients actually benefit from it.

My personal experience is that to qualify for any hospital charity care program, one must complete their paperwork, share all tax, employment, and living expenses, prove that there is a medical need for care, and prove that the applicant has attempted to qualify for state public health programs and received a rejection from those programs. Basically, jump through hoops and hope that whatever medical condition has prompted the application doesn’t get worse while you are waiting for months for a decision. Then if the applicant qualifies, not everything needed is covered and the applicant has to jump through the same hoops again to get something like prescriptions covered by the hospital pharmacy.

It would be nice to just be able to obtain medical care without jumping through hoops to prove that it is needed or deserved.

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