Looking to the Future: Meeting New Challenges and Opportunities
Working on the frontlines of state efforts to implement near-universal health coverage, community health centers are ensuring access for Massachusetts’ residents to timely, ongoing primary and preventive care. Focused on health promotion and disease prevention, community health centers continue to tackle some of the most complex public health issues of our time. Serving communities that are disproportionately affected by the challenges of poverty, chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma, and a longstanding lack of access to health services, community health centers are making an impact in three important ways:
- Offering Critical Health Access: Improving the health of medically underserved communities.
- Providing High Quality, Cost-Effective Care: Producing savings for taxpayers and insurers through the provision of timely, high quality primary and preventive care.
- Serving as Economic Engines: Stimulating economic output in low-income communities hit hard by the economic downturn.
Health care reform efforts can build on the success of the health center movement over the past forty years and ensure that our most vulnerable residents will have access to high quality, comprehensive health care in their own communities. With sufficient reimbursement and investments in infrastructure, Massachusetts health centers could expand capacity, relieve many of the burdens on our over-stressed health system and help make affordable, accessible health care a reality for all of Massachusetts' residents.