While more Americans are insured, free clinics still providing a safety net, By Kate Giammarise, March 28, 2016, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “The Affordable Care Act and expansion of Medicaid have brought health insurance to millions of previously uninsured Americans. But it’s still mostly business as usual at the Birmingham Free Clinic on Pittsburgh’s South Side, where about 90 percent of patients lack health insurance. The remaining 10 percent of patients at the clinic, located in a Salvation Army building off Carson Street, tend to bounce off and on Medicaid, clinical director Mary Herbert estimated…”
Tag: Health clinics
Urban Hospitals and Poverty
Surrounded by poverty, urban hospitals reach out, By Michael Ollove, October 12, 2015, Stateline: “As a child, Bishop Douglas Miles heard the warnings about vans trolling East Baltimore streets, snatching up young African-Americans for medical experiments at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. Whether there was any truth behind those stories—Hopkins has always denied them—hardly mattered. The mythology lived on and, combined with the hospital’s very real development decisions, contributed to a persistent view of Hopkins as an imperious, menacing presence amid the largely poor and African-American neighborhoods surrounding it. ‘Hopkins was viewed with a great deal of suspicion and anger,’ said Miles, who graduated from the school in 1970 and is the bishop of Koinonia Baptist Church in northeast Baltimore. But now, Miles says, that perception could be changing. Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins hospital and health system have launched an ambitious initiative to fill many more jobs with residents from distressed Baltimore neighborhoods, boost the use of minority contractors and vendors from those areas, and require their partners to follow their lead…”
Community Health Centers – Ohio
Community health centers growing in central Ohio amid Medicaid expansion, By Ben Sutherly, October 12, 2015, Columbus Dispatch: “Last month, Candi Pringle quit her half-pack-a-day habit of 38 years. Since then, Pringle’s blood pressure has dropped, and her back pain has eased. When the urge to smoke surfaces, the 50-year-old Columbus woman said she goes for a walk instead. She credits the positive health strides she has made in part to her local community health center on E. 17th Avenue. Known as St. Stephen’s by many, it’s part of PrimaryOne Health, formerly known as the Columbus Neighborhood Health Center. Pringle is familiar with the stigma surrounding community health centers such as hers: It’s just for people who are uninsured or on Medicaid…”