Working on The Impact Special Report: Health care reform in central Washington

While The Impact is on hiatus, I’m working on a special report on national health care reform and what it means for Washingtonians. We’re based out of Olympia, which means we spend a lot of time covering the state’s main population zone – the Puget Sound area. However, some of the biggest health care issues are in rural areas – central and eastern Washington.

To address health care access problems, there are a lot of programs already underway in Yakima, in particular. These programs will be expanded under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in March. One such program is Yakima Neighborhood Health Services – what’s known as a community health center. A demonstration project, launched 45 years ago, created the country’s first two community health centers – one in Massachusetts and one in Mississippi. More than four decades later, community health centers serve 20 million people across the country.

At YNHS, the health services are vast and comprehensive: pediatric, maternity, dental, mental health, pharmaceutical, and vision. Its patients, too, are diverse – Spanish speakers, low-income, Medicaid users, the uninsured. One consistency is that anyone is welcome. The national health care reform law includes $11 billion to expand community health centers like YNHS, in order to address the skyrocketing demand that will come from insuring millions more people. We talk with one of its long-time patients – 29-year-old Leticia Garcia, a mother of 5, who was visiting the clinic with a fever, stomach virus and anxiety-related issues. We learn about her care under the community health center model.

Medical care professionals in Yakima say their region is uniquely poised to address access and primary care issues due to its community health centers and local medical school – Pacific Northwest University. One of the proponents is Dr. Michael Maples, CEO of Community Clinic of Central Washington and board member at PNWU. For nearly three decades, he’s been preaching about the shortage of primary care physicians, and he says, due to the debate surrounding health care reform, he’s finally “feeling the love” for his mission. In our special report, you’ll learn about his Teaching Health Center, aimed at training primary care physicians and keeping them in the community. Dr. Maples also talks about what he considers positives and negatives of the reform law, in terms of addressing workforce shortages.

These are just a couple of the stories we’re tracking down in an effort to explain the impact of health care reform. Watch for our special report in September on TVW.

Tags: health care reform, The Impact