Twin Cities safety net clinics call state’s rating system unfair, By Glenn Howatt, September 8, 2015, Star Tribune: “Safety net clinics, which serve the Twin Cities’ neediest neighborhoods, are arguing that Minnesota’s quality rating system unfairly penalizes them for serving a poorer, sicker population. The clinics are known for helping their patients not just with medical care, but with such basic needs as food, shelter and personal safety…”
Tag: Health clinics
Medicaid Patients and Access to Care
- Subsidized health centers welcome surge of Medicaid patients, By Kathleen O’Brien, February 16, 2015, Star-Ledger: “What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘clinic’? A storefront in the low-rent side of town, with plastic chairs in a crowded waiting room? A cramped examination room with just a curtain for privacy, where worried relatives hover in the hallway? That’s exactly what the old ‘Dover Community Clinic’ looked like a quarter-century ago when it was founded by a newly retired urologist who wanted to treat the poor. Now the Zufall Health Center occupies a renovated bank smack in the center of town, its three-story stone façade conveying solidity and permanence. It has a fancy new name – a Federally Qualified Health Center – and ‘clinic’ is a word consigned to its past…”
- Medicaid patients struggle to get dental care, By Phil Galewitz, February 15, 2015, USA Today: “When Pavel Poliakov’s clothing shop in this picturesque college town closed last year, he felt lucky to be able to sign up for Medicaid just as Colorado expanded the program under President Obama’s health law. But when Poliakov developed such a severe toothache that he couldn’t eat on one side of his mouth, he was unable to find a dentist -— even though Colorado had just extended dental benefits to adults on Medicaid. Eventually, he turned to a county taxpayer-supported clinic that holds a monthly lottery for new patients…”
Medical-Legal Partnerships
Need a doctor? This anti-poverty program will get you a lawyer, too, By Seth Freed Wessler and Kat Aaron, December 13, 2014, NBC News: “When Tony Cox, 53, woke up in the hospital after suffering a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job, he figured he’d hit bottom. ‘All I could think about was getting better and getting back to my family,’ he says. But that day in the hospital was not his lowest point. Over a year later, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the modest two-bedroom house Cox shares with his wife Donna and their now 16-year-old son bearing a notice that their home was in foreclosure. Out of work from the injury, Cox had fallen behind on mortgage payments. ‘We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,’ Donna says. ‘We would have been separated.’ The couple tried to catch up, to renegotiate their mortgage, but could not make the payments—not until they sought help from a legal services attorney, who brought the foreclosure case to court and compelled the bank to renegotiate the terms of their loan. Over the coming years, the person who saved Cox from the worst consequence of his heart attack was not a doctor but a lawyer…”