COVERAGE: Community Health Centers and Our Primary Care Safety Net

How far would you drive for a dentist appointment? If you’re lucky enough to have dental insurance, your answer might be in minutes, but if you’re poor and uninsured in Wisconsin, you might travel up to 250 miles to get to one of Greg Nycz’s community health clinic.

We caught Nycz’s testimony this week at a House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies hearing on “Expanding Health Care Access.” Using his experiences as executive director of Wisconsin’s Marshfield Clinic, Nycz laid out the important role the 1,100 plus community health centers across the U.S. in providing medical, mental, and dental services to more than 17 million Americans a year.

Like most individuals testifying before a House Appropriations panel, Nycz argued for greater and more consistent federal funding of community health centers. We liked his message that community health centers are a good value. The National Association of Community Health Centers which estimates that “these programs save the national health care system between $9.9 billion and $17.6 billion a year by helping patients avoid emergency rooms and making better use of preventive services.”

That’s the kind of savings even former President Dwight Eisenhower could get behind, as his quote on the back of the Rayburn hearing room reads: “Their should be an unremitting effort to improve the health, education, and social-security programs which have proved their value.”