One of the most overlooked assets available to those that don’t have private health insurance is the community health center. These centers see almost 20 million patients per year and by 2015 due to health reform, that number is expected to double. Because the ranks of the uninsured has risen to 50 million, local community health centers are becoming in many cases the best, or at least the main affordable option. Their original desing of course was to provide a primary-care safety net for people in underserved areas, the fact is no one is ever turned away for any reason from a community health center. Even the rich can get be seen though they will be billed on a sliding scale; in most cases uninsured people with higher incomes will pay the full cost of care, which is actually comparable to costs in the private sector.
As the role of the centers has expanded beyond primary care, they have become behavioral health providers, pharmacies, and even offer preventive and restorative dental services on site. Some have pediatric centers, reflecting the fact that more than a third of their patients are children. I often refer the uninsured to these centers as they can provide full service medical care. In Florida Memorial Hospital in Hollywood, Florida offers a terrific plan that sadly is very much overburdened. Luckily, for centers like it there is an $11 billion infusion from the health-care overhaul and $2 billion in federal stimulus funds.
If you have been unable to get health insurance and have been putting off seeing a doctor, please visit our list of community health centers available in each state on our site. For instance, the Florida community health centers take up nearly a page!
A Commonwealth Fund survey of 800 community health centers last year found that 29 percent of them had all five medical-home indicators it measured, including usually providing same- or next-day appointments, off-hours clinical advice, tracking of test results, tracking of patient referrals to specialists, and being able to generate lists of patients by diagnosis. Another 55 percent of centers had three or four indicators.
Still, arranging for specialty care can be tough, the survey found. Ninety-one percent of centers said they had trouble getting their uninsured patients in to see a specialist, while 71 percent said that was the case for Medicaid patients, and 49 percent reported difficulty scheduling their Medicare patients with specialists.
Wait times are another problem at many centers. In part, because they don’t turn anyone away, getting an initial appointment can take months. Once someone becomes a patient at a center, wait times for appointments aren’t generally as long, but they still exist.
