Cincinnati’s Health Care System Buckling Under Weight of Uninsured
The growing uninsured population in the Greater Cincinnati region has created a "critical" situation in which community clinics and hospitals that serve people without coverage are "being pushed to the edge of ruin," the Cincinnati Business Courier reports. In 1999, area hospitals spent $120 million on unreimbursed charity care, a figure that continues to increase as roughly "one in six Greater Cincinatians will find themselves without health insurance" at some point this year. However, the safety net for the uninsured is strained, as the following examples demonstrate:
- The waiting list for a "routine dental appointment" at the Cincinnati Health Department's clinics, a "primary source of low-cost" care, is 3,000 names long.
- These clinics saw 9,000 "emergency dental cases" last year. And even though the emergency room at University Hospital doesn't have a dentist, almost 9% of its emergency patients were dental cases.
- In the past two years, Greater Cincinnati hospitals have lost at least $200 million on operations.
- All seven clinics of the Cincinnati Health Network, which operates public clinics, lost money in 2000.
Toward Primary Care
While "no single solution" exists to the problem of the uninsured, a general consensus exists that the city must increase the availability of "routine" primary care in order to reduce the number of preventable hospitalizations and emergency rooms visits. The city will spend $13.4 million to support health clinics this year, but according to Randy Garland, CEO of the Cincinnati Health Network, the network's financial reserve is empty, potentially forcing the clinics to stop accepting new uninsured patients. In December, he asked the city's finance committee for an additional $300,000 in funding, but as yet, the city has not approved the additional dollars. The state has expanded its Medicaid-expansion CHIP program to include parents of low-income children. However, further expansions are unlikely in the near future since the state faces a $249 million Medicaid shortfall. Moreover, the slowing economy threatens to increase the number of uninsured, which would place an even greater burden on local clinics and hospitals. Dr. Jon Chick, medical director at Southern Ohio Health Services Network, said, "If we've been seeing these kind of changes [in the number of uninsured] with the economy as hot as it was, you can only imagine what it would be like in a downturn" (Head, Cincinnati Business Courier, 4/23).
