Virginia Talks: Your voice, your opinion, loud and clear.

Free Clinics Pay Dividends

Nicki Peet is the deputy executive director of the Virginia Association of Free Clinics.

To see the problem, all it takes is a little imagination.

Imagine: Your diabetes prescription is about to run out. Last month, you could’ve called your pharmacy and gotten a refill within hours, but that was before you lost your job and your health insurance. Other people skip dosages. Maybe you will have to do that now. But you know your condition will just get worse from neglect, maybe even affect your kidneys or your heart.

Your wife had worked up until a year ago, and you felt secure, sailing toward retirement with a solid plan plotted out for your future. Then she got sick and retired. She’s better now, but she still can’t return to work.

The economic downturn got you laid off after 35 years of employment. Your savings went for her care. Now you’re sick, and you don’t know where to turn. There’s always the emergency room. You’re not an emergency yet, but you could be soon. You feel embarrassed.

The ER was helpful. They referred you to a free clinic. You didn’t even know free clinics existed. You felt like a beggar showing up at a free clinic. You had always paid your way. But from the moment you walked in, the receptionist, the screener, the doctor — everyone — treated you kindly and with respect. The care was excellent, and would continue through your chronic condition. You left that day with a prescription in hand. Your wife plans to come to the clinic now, too. You were healing, and you were not ashamed.

Multiply this story and others like it thousands of times over and you will begin to understand the impact free clinics make in Virginia.

Since 2008, largely because of the country’s economic woes and subsequent unemployment rates, the 58 free clinics in Virginia are reporting a 20 percent increase in patients seen, from 61,000 to 76,000. Locally, the Rescue Mission’s G. Wayne Fralin Free Clinic for the Homeless experienced a 27 percent increase in patient visits in 2009.

Facing job loss and/or loss of health insurance, people are coming to free clinics in droves. The Bradley Free Clinic is screening an average of 20 potential new patients each week and the Free Clinic of the New River Valley in Christiansburg is screening 50 potential new patients each week.

While free clinics saw an increase in funding from the General Assembly in 2008 under the Health Care Safety net for clinics, they are slated to experience a decrease in this financial support for 2010. Subsequently, clinics are putting more people on waiting lists and are leaning toward cutting staff, if further cuts are included in the new governor’s budget.

This is true even though clinics are able to leverage $6 in value for every dollar spent, because 90 percent of patient services are provided by volunteer doctors, nurses and medically trained personnel.

Besides giving patients a place to go when they have nowhere else to turn, free clinics save emergency rooms time and money. Lackey Free Clinic in Yorktown is a good example: It saved its local emergency rooms $6.1 million from 2008 to 2009.

What will patients do if the clinics have to turn them away due to lack of funding? Inundate emergency rooms, at a tremendous cost of time and money to the hospitals.

Free clinics primarily treat chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, arthritis and depression; ERs don’t exist for handling chronic health problems. Left untreated, chronically ill people get sicker.

Or, it could be worse. Perhaps sick patients, left with few options, won’t do anything. More sick people in our communities mean sicker families; sick people unable to work means a huge loss of valuable human resources in those same communities.

What can you do to help? Call your local representative and ask him or her to restore funding to Virginia’s Free Clinics, Community Health Centers and the Virginia Health Care Foundation. Improving government support is vital for the health of these institutions and for Virginia’s low-income patients.