A hundred new patients a week come to the Hill Health Center’s various locations. Now $1.7 million in federal stimulus money will help the clinics meet that growing need. Sen. Joe Lieberman was on hand Tuesday morning to talk about it.
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman came to Hill Health Tuesday to announce the stimulus dough, which is coming in stages, and to explain how it ended up coming this week.
Lieberman said he was able to secure $2 billion over two years from the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package for the nation’s community health centers. It was an easy sell, he said. “It didn’t require a lot of advocacy, because the advocacy was done by the health centers like this one.”
The Hill Health Center has already received $400,000 of the $1.7 million to expand its hours and services at its main location on Columbus Avenue to cover more people who are working and those newly unemployed who have lost their health insurance. It’ll be opening at 7 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. to allow working people to get seen quickly, and it will provide expanded services to enable the uninsured to get routine care, rather than going to a hospital emergency department.
The clinic will shortly receive an additional $1.3 million in stimulus money to convert patient records to an electronic database and otherwise improve their information technology systems. And it will be compete for a third pot of stimulus money for capital projects.
Chief Operating Officer Gary Spinner (pictured) said the center doesn’t have enough funding to complete the renovation projects currently underway. There are additional projects the center would like to undertake.
Lieberman said Congress and President Obama want the $780 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to go to projects that will provide immediate jobs, but would also contribute long-term to improving quality of life. “The health centers are just perfect for that, in both ways,” he said.
He added that the community health centers around the country will play an important role in whatever health care reform is passed by Congress “because they deliver health care to a lot of people, on average at a lower cost than a lot of other providers do, and they do it at a very high level of patient satisfaction. I believe we’re on the verge of adopting comprehensive health care reform which will provide access to care for every American, hopefully of higher quality and hopefully, over time, more cost-effective.”
Lieberman was asked about the “public option” of a government-run health insurance plan that Obama is proposing, to exist alongside private health insurance plans. Lieberman said he wasn’t sure it would pass. He said he’d wait to see what happens to the proposal in the Senate Finance Committee.
Speaking of this and all the other stimulus money that will be coming into the state ($3 billion total), Lieberman said, chuckling, “The old line we used to use — ‘The check is in the mail’ — is no longer relevant. Now the checks are electronically transferred to the recipient.”