No.Nonsense.

Approximately 32.5 million people in the US receive health services at 1,700 community health clinics across the country- one in ten of the populace, one in eight children, and over 400,000 veterans. One in three of these clinics is in a rural area where quality medical care is hard to come by. More than half of the patients are uninsured or underinsured, primarily depending on Medicare or Medicaid.

These clinics provide primary care, behavioral health, women’s health, pediatric care, and dental care. The 340B pharmacies associated with these clinics bring quality medicines to those who would not be able to afford them otherwise. These clinics provide needed healthcare care to all, regardless of their ability to pay. They offer deep discounts in out-of-pocket costs to those who have no insurance, a service they are able to provide due to private grants and federal funding.

And they are in trouble due to the cuts that have been ushered in by the Trump administration.

The Health Resources and Services Administration or HRSA, the agency that provides the accreditation and issues the funding grants to the clinics has seen its overall workforce cut by a third and much of its funding frozen. Arbitrary rules for the care the clinics can provide, based on political partisanship, create additional hurdles to jump and increase the threats of losing funding and/or accreditation.

The One Big Beautiful Bill cut one trillion dollars of funding from Medicaid. It further triggered $536 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next ten years. Recertification of Medicaid is now completed every six months instead of yearly, increasing the stress of maintaining health coverage. Up to 10 million citizens will lose their coverage as a result. The misguided narrative is that these cuts were to remove those who are ineligible for the benefit from taking advantage of the program. In reality, what the cuts have accomplished is to eliminate insurance for so many who desperately need it, including children.

Those who are unaware of the services these clinics provide may have the perception of them as the dirty storefront free clinic with lines of indigent people stretched out the door, the image we see on television and in movies. Because of that misperception, many fail to see that these clinics provide a vital service to people from every walk of life, from the family in the big house on the hill to the unhoused addict on the corner, every life worth caring for.

I, myself, benefit from one of these clinics.

When I heard this week about the crisis so many of the centers are facing right now, I sought out concrete statistics on what was happening. What I found was that not one single national news outlet was reporting what is happening. We need to call attention to what has been occurring in the area of public health.

Is it because it’s seen as a problem of the poor? Is it because we view those on Medicaid as less? Is it because the issues of our elderly don’t touch those of us in a younger demographic?

Or is it because we don’t want to acknowledge that caring for all actually serves to lessen our overall healthcare costs because we reduce the prevalence of chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease?

I don’t want a single-payer socialistic health system because the realities of such healthcare is that it delays care due to an overtaxed system that is unable to meet the demand. Community health clinics, however, fill that gap by marrying private and public healthcare to better serve the citizens.

They are worth the fight to protect them and the people they serve.