Access Capital: New Opportunities for Meeting America’s Primary Care Infrastructure Needs
Capital Link; National Association of Community Health Centers; Community Health Ventures, 2008
At the same time that 47 million Americans are without health insurance, an even larger number – 56 million – have no regular source of primary care, because there are far too few primary care physicians in their local communities. These “medically disenfranchised” people live in every state and are disproportionately low-income and otherwise “at risk.” Even more startling is the fact that many of these disenfranchised individuals are actually insured. And demand for care continues to swell.
Access to high quality primary care is an essential element to any effective and efficient health care system, and something that insurance clearly does not guarantee on its own. America’s Community Health Centers have developed an aggressive new plan that charts a course for expanding their care to people currently shut out of primary health care. The ACCESS for All America plan will bridge the provider gap and bring needed and affordable health services to low-income, underserved communities. While health centers currently provide high quality primary and preventive care to more than 17 million previously underserved patients nationally, the ACCESS for All America plan will bring the benefits of health centers to 30 million patients by the year 2015 – lowering the percentage of medically disenfranchised people from 19% to 13% of all U.S. residents. The plan seeks to create a system where no one is shut out of preventive care.
