Providing Health Care One Clinic at a Time

When you hear numbers about the 40 million uninsured Americans, or those whose are in bankruptcy due to their medical illness, the obvious solution is for the government to offer a public option for health care insurance. Surely, the private insurance industry would hate this as they would be bound to lose paying customers, and thus the struggle between the haves and the have-nots continues in Washington. Will a health care bill be passed in 2009?

Perhaps, perhaps not.

But I think that taking a page from the late senator Ted Kennedy's playbook could improve health care access while the economic environment improves: neighborhood community health clinics. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day, and it will take considerably longer to reform the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries which employee a large number of Americans and have significant lobbying power.

Undeniably, there are areas of the country where there exists a severe shortage of doctors, and areas of the country where poverty is rampant and access to health care is almost non-existent. While the government can talk about providing loans for doctors to work a couple of years with underserved patients, or provide grants for studies of such disparities, why can't the government build hospitals and clinics as a non-profit organization, and offer trial government sponsored health care to those who live in these underserved communities?

The late Senator Kennedy worked to establish community health care clinics during his 47 years in the United States Senate, and undoubtedly this has provided health care to hundreds of thousands of people who would not otherwise have health care.

For most successful large academic or scientific endeavors, a prototype was built before the final product was offered. If the government could on a small scale prove that a government run health care program could be both less expensive than other health care plans and offer good medical care then this might provide the political support for nationalization of such programs.

Take a rural community that has only a few primary care physicians, and has a large number of unemployed people, or people who would be classified as the working poor in that they don't make enough to buy private health insurance, but don't qualify for medicaid. The government could give funds for a health care clinic, or even hospital, to be built which would operate on a non-profit scheme, and which would use an experimental government health care plan, perhaps based on medicare, would strive to offer excellent health care, and keep costs down.

The mere construction of such a government funded hospital or clinic would probably boost the local economy of the community as well, in addition to providing jobs. Of course it would be an expensive investment, but if preventive health care was focused upon, it could end up saving dollars spent on health care later on due to obesity related diseases.

Currently, the only way to test a public health insurance option would be to pass federal regulations and start funding programs that nobody knows what the full effects would be. A public option might be very successful and help a large number of Americans obtain health care, it is the unknown factor that has frightened a large number of Americans. While there are many models for what a public option might look like, such as a the Indian Health Services health care system which provides health care to Native Americans, to Medicare and Medicaid; until a real world prototype is tested, hysteria and fear radiating from constituents may lead politicians to forgo passage of healthcare this year.

Even politicians in Congress are looking for real world tested health care insurance prototypes such as community Co-Ops. Funding a small scale prototype public option, ideally at a prototype hospital of the future which focuses on keeping costs down while providing excellent care, would give valuable data about how a public or non-profit insurance option could help expand regular health care services to the millions of Americans without it.

Source: Kennedy's Legacy Lives At Dorchester Health Clinic, http://www.wbur.org/2009/08/26/kennedy-uphams-corner