Portland-area clinics busy as economy dives
Monday, October 6, 2008 10:27 AM PDT
PORTLAND (AP) — A growing number of uninsured Oregonians are getting health care at low-cost clinics.
But some clinics have had to turn people away because of the rising demand. And more of the patients they do treat are unable to pay anything, saddling the clinics with debt just as inflation and rising unemployment send more patients to their doors.
‘‘It’s really tragic that when people need health care the most and coverage the most, when they’re sick and unemployed, they don’t have it,’’ said Gil Munoz, chief executive of Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center, which runs clinics in Washington and Yamhill counties.
Virginia Garcia’s four primary-care clinics serve about 30,000 patients, Munoz said, but about 90,000 uninsured live in Washington and Yamhill counties.
‘‘I think we’re going to see it get worse before it gets better,’’ Dr. Bob Sayson, who runs the Good News Community Health Center in east Portland, told The Oregonian newspaper.
‘‘We’re seeing people who used to be middle class and lost their insurance, who have been laid off, things like that,’’ he said.
Low-cost clinics focus on chronic illness such as diabetes or heart disease. It’s much cheaper and safer to control those diseases than to treat the strokes, seizures and heart attacks that can strike when they spin out of control.
One such patient is Jesse Cain, a real estate agent who can’t afford health insurance because few houses are selling at the current prices.
Cain went without care for months before finally going to a clinic and getting diagnosed with diabetes.
‘‘If it wasn’t for the people at the clinic, I might not be here today,’’ Cain said. ‘‘It’s bad enough to know you’re sick. Then you have no way to pay for it. That starts not just a physical drain but an emotional drain, too.’’
The clinics discount their charges based on income, down to a $15 fee for patients at the poverty level. Usually, Munoz expects about 20 percent of those charges to be unpaid. But in the past four months, more than a third of the charges haven’t been paid. That works out to $52,000 more bad debt than the clinics assumed in the same four months of 2007.
‘‘It’s dicey, and we don’t have really deep reserves we can turn to,’’ Munoz said.
