Community health centers: Casting a wider safety net

An infusion of federal funds is fueling a boom of expansion among health centers serving the nation's low-income and uninsured patients.

By Amy Snow Landa, AMNews correspondent. Sept. 2, 2002.

Model Cities Health Center in St. Paul, Minn., defies the image some may have of such facilities as overcrowded, worn and barely scraping by on meager resources.

The clinic, which serves mainly low- and moderate-income patients who are uninsured or on Medicaid, is newly renovated. It is buzzing with new patients and offering an enhanced menu of services. The waiting area is spacious and comfortable. Artwork covering the walls reflects the diversity of its patients, most of them African-American and Southeast Asian, but also white, Latino and West African.

"We want our patients to come to a first-class physical plant because we feel we have first-class doctors," said Executive Director Barton Warren, who oversaw the purchase and remodeling of the clinic's new facility, which opened in August 2001.

The renaissance under way at Model Cities and other St. Paul clinics offers a snapshot of the aggressive expansion and improvements being pursued by many health centers around the country -- a trend fueled in large part by a surge in federal funding.

Washington is putting more money than ever into the federal grant program that subsidizes community and migrant health centers, as well as homeless-, public housing- and school-based health centers. Nationwide, these facilities now number more than 3,300 sites. More will be added. Last year Congress and the Bush administration agreed to an initiative that would accelerate health center expansion by doubling the program's funding over five years. The goal is to build or expand 1,200 health center sites by 2006. [...]