Like other local government agencies, the Flagler County Health Department’s budget is shrinking—from $4.3 million this year to $3.6 million next year, a 16 percent reduction.
No one is being laid off. Rather, four employees left this year and four positions that had been vacant won’t be filled. “We have really downsized with no active employee losing jobs–eight positions, and of course across the board we’ve cut our expenditures across the department,” Patrick Johnson, the department’s administrator, said. Fewer patients are coming to the department for primary care through Medicaid–the health insurance program for the poor–because the state is diverting them to managed care options.
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But the health department remains a critical link to care for the neediest, though the link is more tenuous as dollars drop.
One of the ways Johnson wants to counter the loss is to open a federally funded community health center in Flagler County. If he’s successful, the health department would get a grant worth $700,000 a year for five years. The center would be open to Medicaid and Medicare recipients, the government insurance programs for the poor and the elderly. But it would be especially focused on the poor and working poor, including the uninsured: That’s almost a fifth of the county population.
Landing the grant is not as simple as applying. The health department has to show community interest, involvement and, of course, broad input. With that in mind, the department today launched a 20-question community health survey, open to all, to gauge Flagler County’s health. (You can take the survey here.) The survey asks residents to rate such things as the most important features of a healthy community (from arts and culture to good schools to quality child care to parks and recreation, among many others), rate the most common health problems in Flagler (child abuse, teen pregnancy, diabetes, heart disease, smoking), rate top concerns about unhealthy behavior, and so on.
One of the questions also asks what health services are difficult to get in this community, and what makes access to care difficult—whether cost, lack of transportation, worries over privacy or other reasons.
Some of that mobilization took place this morning in a three-hour health summit at Palm Coast’s the Hilton Garden Inn, where the health department laid out its MAPP timeline and heard from a broad range of community leaders, including representatives from almost every local government and Florida Hospital Flagler’s top executives, on what’s needed to improve the county’s health profile.
“These grants are highly competitive,” Johnson said. “For me to be applying for grants I need to have clear direction and the voice of people from Flagler County. That’s one of the goals here: what do you want out of your health care system? When you see the survey you’re going to see that. How good is the health care system here, how good is your health? I want to have all of that data for me to use for applications for improving services here, because my resources are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.”
“What I predicted came true,” he added. “Most people are interested in linking to health care services and providing services to those folks who don’t have services. That’s one of the things that people tend to focus on.”
It wasn’t just curiosity that brought David Ottati, Florida Hospital Flagler’s CEO, and three of his top staffers to the summit. A community health center would have a direct bearing on the hospital’s services and bottom line. Currently, the hospital covers several millions dollars’ worth of services to poorer patients who have no insurance, but end up at the hospital’s emergency room, not always by necessity so much as by choice. “One of the things with community health care is ER diversion,” Johnson said. “People don’t need to be using emergency departments for routine care. They are very supportive of my effort,” he said, referring to hospital administrators. “They want this to succeed. They want to be able to tell people who show up in an ER, you have another choice, you know, you can go right down there and get in right there.”
Though not closed to them, the community health center would not affect a large class of people such as those on Medicare or those who have generous employee-provided health insurance—or those who can afford their own. Nothing will change for those groups. Those at the lower end of the income scale will have better choices for health care, though the center’s focus on education –for diabetics, for smokers, for people who want to improve nutrition and lose weight—won’t be driven by income brackets.
It’s also a very long, very competitive process. Last year the federal government initially said it would be funding 350 such centers. It received 800 applications. Just 70 were approved.
One unanswered question: how health care reform will impact community health centers. The reform’s central plank, which doesn’t kick in until 2014, requires almost all individuals to have insurance. The aim is to wipe out the ranks of the uninsured. It’s not clear what, by then, should reform live up to its promise, would become of community health centers whose need is driven by the uninsured.
Reform’s larger aim is to lower medical costs for society as a whole. In that sense, community health centers would play a direct role by, for example, diverting patients from more expensive alternatives.
“We have needed some organization to pull all of the available resources together even though there are different groups that are somewhat doing it,” Flagler County Commissioner Babara Revels said after the summit, endorsing the summit’s big-picture approach. “Resources are going to continue to drop, need is going to continue to grow, and we’d better be as tightly wound and efficient as possible to meet that need and get our community citizens involved in helping.”
lawabidingcitizen says
Free health clinics in low income neighborhoods were the rule before the socialists decided that poor people shouldn’t be stigmatized by being forced to go to free tax payer funded clinics and should be treated the same as paying customers. The results were bloated bureaucracies like Medicaid where most of the funds goes into administration and public health unions. The sick? Who cares about them? It’s power and control that are important to lefties.
So now, we’ve come 360 degrees and it’s back to free neighborhood clinics. I sure hope those federal funds don’t get into the hands of union thugs or it’ll be just more of the same — but I’m not very sanguine about it.
Binkey says
I completed the survey. The survey only takes a few minutes.
Jack says
An excerpt from the article: One unanswered question: how health care reform will impact community health centers. The reform’s central plank, which doesn’t kick in until 2014, requires almost all individuals to have insurance. The aim is to wipe out the ranks of the uninsured. It’s not clear what, by then, should reform live up to its promise, would become of community health centers whose need is driven by the uninsured.
I thought one of the immediate provisions of the health reform bill was the increased funding for community health centers to allow for nearly a doubling of the number of patients seen by the centers over the next 5 years. Am I right or wrong?
Edward says
Now ONLY if they can manage not to have a mouth mangling dentist on their staff.
Elana Lee says
Patrick is correct, this is one of the more difficult grants to aquire. In 2000, in Chatham County Georgia, I painstakingly completed this grant for what was called at the time an FQHC, or Federally Qualified Health Center. The particular zip code was designated both a medically underserved area (MUA) and medically underserved population (MUP). We had two major hospitals in the area whose emergency departments were frequented by patients who did not have insurance and who had no other choice but to use them for their primary care. By collecting key data points, we were able to project a savings of $1.1 million per year per hospital in diverted unnecessary ER visits for which the hospitals would have ended up writing off.
Fast forward, we had enormous community support and we received the grant. With many community partners on board and in-kind donations of labor and materials from a variety of creative sources, we used the funding wisely and built a beautiful state of the arts facility on a shoe-string budget (by choice). Another key factor is that once you receive the CHC funding, you don’t stop there, keep on with companion grant funding, make your project attractive for student physician residents, nursing students, etc. I also “hired” a full time licensed registered pharmacist who only wanted to work for a stipend to oversee our patient assistance program. The pharmacist was a paraplegic, wheel-chair bound, but he heard about our program and wanted to be a part of it.
Creativity is the key. Think outside the proverbial box. Community Health Centers are not stereotypical innercity dirty chewing gum on the floor broken plactic chairs clinics. Way to go, Patrick! I’m going to take the survey right now, too! I have long thought that CHC’s are the answer to many of the issues that plague our system.
Elana Lee says
Edward above: Being a 501 c 3 (non-profit), our CHC had an awesome dental program staffed with volunteer dentists from the community. Many area dentists volunteered their time one day per year to work in our dental clinic. In return, we provided them a receipt for value of their time, which is of course tax-deductible for them. Plus the value of the medical providers in-kind services count as a match for some grant requirements, so it’s a win-win-win for the providers, for the CHC, and especially for the patients. We never had any bad dentists ( or any bad providers) to mangle anyone. And the physicians/dentists who donate their time are protected from malpractice suits, but that’s too long to go into here. There’s just a whole lot of benefits with CHC’s.
Edward says
Say what you want but it was a lose-lose for me. My mouth was mangled by your “free dentist”, not yours. IF this guy got paid via tax deduction or otherwise, it was blood money. The only recourse I have is to gripe to anybody that will listen because people like YOU and Patrick Johnson seem to think your “free service” means a patient has to just shut up and hurt. You say you don’t have bad dentist? Ask Mr. Johnson about my case. He knows.
Elana Lee says
Edward: I will listen to you, and I am very sorry that happened to you. The CHC I helped start was in Georgia, not here, but I’m back in this area now and know from experience that CHC’s work well. Unfortunately anyone can have a bad experience with a dentist (or other type physician), whether in a clinic setting, health department, or in a private office covered by the best insurance. Many of us in Florida still recall the case from years back of the young woman who contracted AIDS from her dentist in central Florida, and that was in a private office, not a free clinic. There is most likely help or assistance available if you are still suffering or are in pain from the procedure to fix or correct whatever it was that went wrong. You may not think it, but there are health care professionals who do really care.
Edward says
I will admit that by and large MOST health care professionals really care and my situation is the exception and not the rule but it still doesn’t change the fact of what happened. i am angry because I am saddled with a problem that was NOT my making and the people responsible are turning a blind eye to my plight. I am aware of the Dr. David Acer case being big as I was growing up and AIDS was something to fear. Unlike today.(sarcastic)
If you know of a service that can assist me please contact me [email protected].