(Another) Letter to Senator Bruce Caswell and Representative Ken Kurtz

As a free clinic in your district, serving the most vulnerable of your constituents, we urge you to support expanding and reforming Medicaid to help rein in the high cost of health care, support health care providers and give families access to quality affordable treatments and services.

As you know, our clinic serves people with little to no health insurance, many of them working citizens with families. For them, the first time they see a doctor is when they go to an emergency room, when a medical situation that was otherwise preventable and treatable has become a full-blown medical emergency. This puts their health and lives at risk, and sends health care costs for everyone else through the roof.

By expanding and reforming Medicaid, we can help more than 450,000 people in Michigan get frontline quality health care. They can see family physicians. They can get regular check-ups. They can get treatment plans for a wide range of manageable diseases such as diabetes and many others. All of these add up to a healthier Michigan.

Every year, hospitals across Michigan lose nearly $2 billion in uncompensated care treating uninsured and underinsured people. Helping more people get access to care through Medicaid will significantly reduce these cost burdens, allowing hospitals to improve outcomes, add jobs and support the local economy.

Without Medicaid expansion, hospitals will see even further cuts to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates, exacerbating an already difficult health care environment. Without expansion, we risk weakening both the hospitals and their ability to provide medical care, and worsening the health-care crisis in Michigan.

Free clinics are the ones who experience and, to the extent we can with very limited resources, address this crisis every day. We see what lack of access to medical care, treatment and services do to people and our communities.

For all these reasons, Medicaid expansion is the best way forward for Michigan’s future, and that’s why we urge you to support this critical health care policy opportunity.

Amanda

Amanda has been a patient here for the past two and a half years. She is employed full time as a manicurist, but has no health insurance.

She is diabetic with high blood pressure. Since she started coming here, she has taken control of her life and has lost nearly 100 pounds. It has made a huge difference in her life. Her blood pressure runs from 106/70 to 120/80; her fasting blood sugar levels that she checks daily are at or below 120 and her Hemoglobin A1C – a blood test that provides a snapshot of blood sugar control over a six- to 12-week time period – is under 6, which is considered a non-diabetic level.

It is challenging for her to eat properly on her limited income, but she tries. She says without the clinic to help with her medications, diabetic testing supplies and lab work she would be “a dead duck.”

NEHM Conference

I am back from NEHM conference. I always love attending their conference - I have actually been to all of the NEHM conferences since they started having them. The conference is a great way to meet other people doing health ministry. It is a good reminder that not all health ministry looks alike, but that we are all doing the work we are called to do in our communities.

Those attending the conference include nurses, priests, bishops, lay leaders and this year, even a monk. The conference combines educational opportunities with worship opportunities. We seem to always eat very well, and for me it is a time to rest and reflect. I always come home feeling refreshed.

Next year the conference will be in New Orleans May 8-10. Put it on your calendar and come join us!

NEHM

NEHM is National Episcopal Health Ministries. I am at their annual conference in Baltimore this week. What a blessing to be here with people from all across the country who share my passion for health ministry and social justice.

Yesterday I gave my presentation on "Navigating the Healthcare System". Thanks to Sue Hacker Nelson for  technical support, and to NEHM CEO, Matt Ellis and to Maryfran Crist for their support and encouragement.

Free Clinics of Michigan

I am proud to serve on the board of the Free Clinics of Michigan. At our annual meeting last week, we adopted the following position statements:

Position Statements Adopted by FCOM at the Annual Meeting, April 26, 2013

FCOM Position Statement on

Health Care as a Human Right

The Free Clinics Of Michigan (FCOM) affirm that health care is a human right.  To this end free clinics provide a safety net of primary care for uninsured persons, while working for a reformed U.S. healthcare system that is inclusive, available, acceptable, affordable, and of good quality.

 

FCOM Position Statement on the

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The Free Clinics of Michigan (FCOM) affirm the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 as a means to extend healthcare coverage to many of our nation’s 50 million uninsured.  Health reform does not end with the ACA, so we will work for a healthcare system that is inclusive, available, acceptable, affordable, and of good quality.  Until that goal is achieved, free clinics continue to serve those who are uninsured and need care, including immigrants and others who fall through the healthcare safety net.

Further, FCOM supports the expansion of Medicaid eligibility in Michigan, in order to improve the health status of our citizens by providing coverage to more than 400,000 uninsured citizens. 

 

 

 

My Family

One of the faces of the uninsured that I have not talked about is in my own family. My 29-year-old son is uninsured.

He is a professional pilot working as a flight instructor at Western Michigan University. He works as a contract employee, so he is only paid for the hours he works and he has no benefits.

He loves his job; he has found real joy in teaching young men and women who will go on to fly for airlines, cargo companies and industry. But he lives without healthcare insurance. I live in fear of what that could mean for him if he were to become ill.

He will be subject to the mandate in 2014; but he will also have the opportunity to buy healthcare coverage with the tax credits that will be available.

The uninsured rate among young adults was 27.9% in 2011, a decrease in recent years due in part to the ACA provision allowing them to remain on a parent’s private health plan until age 26. The change in coverage for this age group accounted for about 40% of the overall decline in the number of uninsured. However, young adults continue to have a high uninsured rate compared to other age groups.

 

 

James and Diane (Rodosalewicz) Copeland as told to Liz Webb

“They saved our lives!” Diane said of the staff and volunteers at St. Peter’s Free Clinic as she turned her smiling face and swept her arm toward the staff and volunteers in the basement of the St. Peters Episcopal Church. 

 

James and Diane Copeland moved to Hillsdale County in 2002 from Sumpter, MI near Belleville, looking forward to their retirement in a house that Diane loves and that is surrounded by twenty acres of land on which James hunts.  After settling here, James was completing his 20th year of work at the Kmart Distribution Center in Canton, Michigan, driving back and forth to Hillsdale.  Unfortunately, when Kmart merged with Sears in 2005, the Canton Kmart location closed and James lost his job.  The work that was done in that center is now done in Chicago.  Previously, James had worked at Firestone in Wyandotte for 15 years before that business relocated to Kentucky.

 

When his unemployment from Kmart ran out in 2006, James applied for a seasonal mowing job at the Hillsdale County Road Commission.  In a pre-employment medical check, a doctor told him he had high blood pressure and since he had no insurance and no doctor, he came to the St. Peter’s Free Clinic for help with that and Diane came with him.  Volunteers at the clinic found that both of them had extremely high blood pressure:  hers was the highest ever recorded at the clinic.  

 

The job James has at the Road Commission is going well and they asked him to join them for five months this winter to do maintenance work for 25 hours a week.  But he still has no health insurance and so they come to the clinic regularly for blood pressure checks and for the medication to control it.

 

In explaining how they came to Hillsdale, Diane repeatedly said, “God brought us here.”  She went on to explain that when they would drive out to look for a house, they repeatedly drove by the same place.  It had a pond out back that was appealing and when she walked in the door she said, “I knew this was my house.”  It needed little fix-ups that James could do.  “The bones are good.”

 

The property they live on provides much of their food through gardening and hunting.  They can tomatoes and freeze green beans.  James advises that “Jade green beans are the very best.”  They especially love spaghetti squash, asparagus, and black raspberries, as well as pears and apples from their trees.  They catch fish in the pond and eat any squirrel, rabbit or venison that James shoots.  “We can make that nickel squeak,” said James.

 

When James and Diane were both working in Belleville (she as a letter carrier at the post office for ten years), they loved to do some vacation traveling with family to Yellowstone, the Tetons, Branson, Missouri, Dollywood, Florida, Boston, Colorado and Niagara.  These last few years have been economically challenging for them and they have not been able to travel.

 

Diane said, “This medical clinic really helps us.  I love to make short bread and bring it in for the workers.”  These patients really appreciate the care and treatment they receive at St. Peter’s Free Clinic.