Health cuts now will hurt us later

Community health centers across Idaho and here in Kootenai County see firsthand the faces of our state's economic recession. These are senior citizens and families who were once solidly middle class and insured, and are now struggling without jobs or with jobs which now provide no health insurance.

The result is that they no longer have a place to go for health care. It is their plight that demonstrates why access to preventive care is critical. A case in point is a test for a patient with diabetes. At a community health center, such as Dirne, testing a patient's glucose level to determine if he or she has diabetes and follow-up treatment is exponentially cheaper than the same test conducted by a laboratory services company or a private practitioner. The average cost of care at a community health center is less expensive at $1.67 per patient per day, compared to the U.S. average of $2.64 at all physician offices.

People will always get sick and need care. The critical question, from a public policy perspective, are "Do we want to provide people with preventive services at a community health center before they are sick, and treat them with primary care services for relatively routine health issues, or do we force them to go without care until they are critically ill and need to rush to the hospital, where the cost of their care - a cost that our community will pay - is much more expensive?" Herein rests the problem for members of Congress and members of the Idaho legislature who are grappling with a political mandate for fiscal restraint. For every public dollar we invest in community health centers, taxpayers get a significant return on that investment in terms of cost-savings, better community health, and hospitals that are free to save the lives of the truly sick and imperiled.

For every dollar that the State of Idaho contributes to providing its most vulnerable citizens with Medicaid, it receives matching Federal funds equal to three times the State investment, to provide local health care. Yes, those are also tax dollars, but tax dollars that will be spent elsewhere if we can't provide the State match. If Congress approves a proposed $1.3 billion spending cut for funding to the national community health centers program, as approved by the House on Feb. 19, the result will be a nearly 60 percent reduction in funding for health centers nationwide.

For Coeur d'Alene and Kootenai County, the impact of that spending cut will mean that Dirne will have to greatly reduce its services and that many of the 10,000 patients Dirne served in 2010 will have reduced access to care. Those patients must either go without preventive medical care, or wait for care at the hospital. That is just the local impact. If the proposed cuts are approved, health centers across the country will lose the capacity to serve 11 million patients, and many will be faced with closing their doors.

Where will these patients go for care? The numbers of people who need health care has not abated and in reducing their access, we confront a crisis that poses an even greater risk to our community's health -- higher rates of chronic disease, higher health-care costs, more needless illness and death, and a reduction in health services for everyone. Quite simply, this is a prescription we can't afford.

Len Crosby is a Post Falls resident.