From the article:
The historic bill signed today by President Obama includes provisions Senator Sanders long advocated for, including $10 billion over five years to expand, construct and operate community health centers. It also increases the investment in the National Health Service Corps to train more primary care doctors and other health care professionals. Another $2.5 billion for health centers operations is in the reconciliation package.
All told, the legislation will double the number of health center sites nationally over the next five years from 7,500 to 15,000. The number of patients served by these facilities will rise from 20 million today to about 40 million by 2015. That means most Americans will have access to primary care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs on a sliding-fee scale so that no one is turned away. Since 18,000 Americans die annually due to their inability to afford insurance or care, these facilities are literally life-saving changes in our health care system.
And this is classic invest-to-save policymaking. The investment made in expanding health centers will keep folks out of costlier hospitals and save taxpayers money.
According to researchers at George Washington University, the healthcare centers will save Medicaid $17 billion over the five-year period that would otherwise be spent on more expensive hospital and emergency room care. The American Academy of Family Physicians found that total medical expenses for health center patients were 41 percent lower compared to patients seen elsewhere.
Another reason this bill is so historic and so right. Another reason its opponents are so short-sighted and wrong.
Spending a little money on these clinics now will save much more in the future.
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p>This is one of the most obvious pragmatic policies America could have, but these two guys calculated they can get more votes by demagoguing the issue. That’s a terrible political compromise.
I’ve followed him since I was a kid in Montpelier who loved what he did as Mayor of Burlington. The only national politician I have given money to.
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p>I wish more of our politicians would take his practical sense of just getting good things done.