Expansion of health clinics shapes a Bush legacy

[Angel Heart]

Expansion of health clinics shapes a Bush legacy - International Herald Tribune

Expansion of health clinics shapes a Bush legacy
By Kevin Sack

Friday, December 26, 2008
NASHVILLE: Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President George W. Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled U.S. governemnt financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.

For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.

Despite the clinics' unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.

In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.

In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.

Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center's chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville's pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.


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[American Horse]

It's too bad that so many people are unaware of these clinics. My wife and I use one exclusively for our medical services. We have three in our town of about 50,000 people. I can walk in, without an appointment, and see a doctor within 5 to 20 minutes, and he will ask me questions to reveal any and all of what may be a problem for me, and prescribe (or give me free samples) medicines, and the flat fee is $50.00. The last time I went in the doc ordered me 5 tests I hadn't thought of needing, one of which was to detect cancer antibodies in my blood. The took the blood samples there and reported back in a few days, with results that made me very happy.

So many people think first of the hospital emergency room, and just go there first off.

Both my wife and I walked into our clinic on a saturday afternoon, and both got flue shots and were out in 10 minutes; cost: $20.00 for each of us.

Clinics work to make medical services more competitive, the whole purpos of President Bush.