The following article by Jonathan Cohn was posted on the Huffington Post website February 4, 2018:
This time the issue is funding for community clinics — which, in theory, everybody supports.
LOS ANGELES ― Jim Mangia, CEO of the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, spent much of the last year wondering how many of his facilities he would have to shutter. St. John’s is a network of health clinics serving roughly 100,000 of the poorest people in Los Angeles. If Republicans had succeeded in repealing the Affordable Care Act, St. John’s revenue would have dropped as more of its patients became uninsured, making layoffs and closings all but inevitable.
The threat of repeal seems to have subsided, at least for the moment. But these days Mangia has a new worry. A federal program called the Community Health Center Fund, which subsidizes federal clinics through direct grants, officially expired in the fall. Congress has since made a pair of short-term appropriations, in order to keep the grant money flowing, and leaders in both parties talked about coming together on a deal that would finance the clinics for a longer period of time. Continue reading “Congress Left Health Care For Millions Of Poor People In The Lurch”