Texas ranks last among states in access to health care and has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country. Two longtime doctors in rural Henderson County created a homegrown safety net to fill the gap. Via pubhealthwatch:
Curran has tried for years to persuade the Republican-dominated state Legislature to address these problems. When he served as president of the Texas Medical Association from 2018 to 2019, he made it his mission to get Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage, a positionof Texans now support, according to a 2020 poll by the Episcopal Health Foundation.
The idea was to build a network of safety-net clinics to serve a mostly rural area east of Dallas, beginning with the clinic in Gun Barrel City. They’d combine the clinics with a medical residency program to bring desperately needed new doctors into the region. Where they went wrong, Curran said, was in underestimating how hard it would be “to get a good thing done.”
“Here I am, 70 years old, starting a new adventure,” he said. “You kind of ask yourself, what in God’s name am I doing?” The Dallas-based Ginger Murchison Foundation, whose namesake had deep ties to Henderson County, where ETCC is based, and Ardent Health, a privately owned company that operates health care facilities in Texas and other states, donated the $200,000 in seed money. A third funder — the East Texas Medical Center Foundation — stepped up after Curran drove one of its board members, a neurosurgeon and old friend, to Waco to visit a safety-net clinic similar to what ETCC was hoping to build.
But there was one big difference between this clinic and their old practice. Patients paid only what they could afford, even if that meant they couldn’t pay anything at all. Everyone was welcome.But word quickly spread, and within a couple of weeks the clinic was booked. Some people traveled hours for the chance to see a doctor.
One woman had postponed surgery for an abdominal tumor because she had lost her job and health insurance. Some people had been living with untreated diabetes. Others were on the cusp of kidney failure. The doctors rarely went a week without seeing someone who lived in a car.Estrada’s father, Emilio, now comes to ETCC for care. So does her mother, Debra, who works a mile down the road at the local WIC office, which serves low-income women and children. Debra sends her WIC clients there, too.
Glen Robison, CEO of the East Texas Community Clinic, in his Athens office in November. Robison is in charge of securing the clinic’s long-term funding.The clinic had to be up and running six months before he could even submit an application. During that period, it had to abide by strict FQHC rules to prove it was worthy of the special designation. It couldn’t refuse care to anyone. It had to make its services easily accessible.
Robison thought details like these would prove that the clinic deserved FQHC status. People familiar with the process told him he’d probably hear back from the Health Resources and Services Administration in about 30 days — although he figured it might be a bit longer, given that the nation was in the midst of another COVID-19 surge.In March 2021, Robison sent the Health Resources and Services Administration an email asking about the status of the application.
Their three core donors had committed to keep them afloat until they got through the FQHC application process, but they couldn’t depend on charity forever. If they didn’t qualify as an official FQHC, their plan would be unsustainable in the long term.They opened the Athens clinic in June 2021, a couple of months after their FQHC application was rejected. It sits in the center of Athens’ medical district, next door to the 127-bed University of Texas Health hospital.
Robison searched everywhere for good deals. He bought an 18-foot conference table and a hutch for $400 from an attorney who was closing her office in Houston, nearly 200 miles away. He found 14 matching upholstered chairs for the waiting room — $86 for the lot — from a seller in Cedar Hill, 100 miles to the northwest. He roped the seats to the bed of his truck and drove them home.
“Athens is a very tight-knit town,” Reaves said. “And a lot of it is because of people like Dr. Curran.” Dr. Doug Curran treats a patient at the East Texas Community Clinic’s original location in Gun Barrel City in November. The clinic has since moved into a bigger building down the road.Robison was rewriting the FQHC application with help from the Texas Association of Community Health Centers. He managed the clinics by day and worked evenings and weekends on the application. He said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, including his four years in the Air Force.
The Texas Legislature was divvying up $16 billion in federal COVID-19 relief money, and one idea was to use $200 million of it to reboot an incubator program the state had once offered to clinics that were trying to become FQHCs.“[It] didn’t seem excessive in light of the access-to-care issues that Texas has,” he said. Not only was ETCC providing affordable care to thousands of uninsured Texans, it was also training young doctors who might end up staying in the rural region for good.
funds. But Curran was stunned to see that applicants could ask for no more than $170,000, not the millions he had hoped for. This, he said, was “just a joke.” The clinics burned through that much in a few months.
South Africa Latest News, South Africa Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Brazos County won’t restore Texas A&M early-voting location despite students’ pushbackBrazos County won't restore the on-campus early-voting location at Texas A&M University for the 2022 elections. For months, A&M students fought against county’s removal of the early-voting site — a decision students say would suppress the youth vote.
Read more »
Two upcoming hiring events in Pima CountyPima County Community and Workforce Development will be holding two hiring events in the upcoming days.
Read more »
Two arrested for DUI during Annual Cochise County Fair driving detailTwo DUI arrests were made in the Douglas area during a driving detail around the Annual Cochise County Fair, according to a Sierra Vista Police Department press release.
Read more »
4 Houston barbecue joints named best in Southern Living’s South’s Top 50Four Houston-area barbecue joints found their way onto Southern Living magazine’s list of “The South’s Top 50 Barbecue Joints.”
Read more »
Warden of Texas immigrant jail fired after allegedly shooting 2 migrants along roadwayThe warden of a West Texas federal jail for immigrants has been fired after he and a brother allegedly shot at migrants walking along a roadside in Hudspeth County on Sept. 27, killing one and wounding another.
Read more »
Army veteran father of two patrols Texas schools following shootingA father of two who retired from the U.S. Army has taken to patrolling the streets of his children's school district in Texas.
Read more »