Why is it important to have healthcare facilities in your neighbourhood?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Community health centers across our country have a 45-year history of providing care in underserved communities for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. By design, these health centers are run by a board of directors comprised mostly of health center patients, ensuring the care delivered is tailored for the needs of the communities they serve.
Community health centers enjoy strong bipartisan support. President George W. Bush committing to double the number of patients seen by these centers during his presidency and succeeded, and President Barack Obama committing an additional $2 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help these important community health centers expand their operations and build new centers.
Community health centers quickly demonstrated they could put additional federal investments to work, ramping up to provide care for an increased numbers of patients and expand their services. With the $2 billion Recovery Act investment, these centers were projected to provide care to an additional 2.9 million patients over the stimulus act’s two-year funding period, but in fact registered seeing over 2 million additional patients in the first year of funding—indicative of the demand for community health services in our country.
Now, because of the passage of comprehensive health care reform earlier this year, an additional 32 million Americans will have health insurance coverage with about half of these individuals to be covered through an expansion of the Medicaid program. Once again, policy makers identified community health centers as ideal locations to provide this additional care. Through the Affordable Care Act, these health centers will receive an additional funding over the next five years to expand services and prepare to help meet the needs of these newly covered Americans. The new law provides an additional $9.5 billion in operating costs and $1.5 billion for new construction. With this additional funding, community health centers will be able to double the number of patients they serve to up to 40 million annually by 2015.
Along with providing quality health care at these sites, these investments in community health centers will help neighborhoods where they are located. Studies demonstrate that increased funding to health centers creates additional economic stimulus both within the center and beyond. The nearly $2 billion investment from the stimulus act, for example, generated $3.2 billion of economic activity, and in 2009, health centers generated approximately $20 billion in economic activity for their local communities. By intent, these health centers are located in lower income medically underserved communities mostly in rural and inner-city neighborhoods. In addition, studies find these are the same areas with the highest rates of unemployment and the highest rates of uninsurance.
This memo examines the important role community health centers play in both health care delivery and improved neighborhood economic activity, describes how stimulus act funding quickly translated into expanded health care and improved fiscal health, and estimates the economic impact the additional ACA funding will have on economic activity and the creation of more jobs. In the pages that follow, we also will demonstrate that all of this new funding will generate $53.7 billion in economic activity for some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country over the next five years, with $33.5 billion of this total attributable to the increased investments via the Affordable Care Act. Over this same period, these centers will support 457,289 jobs in these same communities (over 284,000 as a result of ACA funding)