County’s planned health care cut will compound the suffering of the homeless and poor

Homeless people in Greensboro get their health care in the emergency rooms of our local hospitals and at the two HealthServe clinics, whose burgeoning patient loads have forced them to limit access to care. HealthServe is obviously more cost-effective than an ER visit, but Guilford County Commissioners plan a $1.6 million cut to health care that will affect HealthServe and other programs that serve the poor and homeless, further burdening an already overwhelmed system and hurting our community’s most vulnerable residents.

The Guilford Community Care Network added more doctors this year and is reaching out to specialists to help care for the county’s increasing number of uninsured.

But those efforts might be derailed if the county goes through with a planned $1.6 million cut to Guilford Adult Health, which would funnel down to Moses Cone’s HealthServe and High Point Regional’s adult health clinic.

The cut could “impact the care of several thousand patients,” said Dr. David Talbot, who works for Moses Cone Health System as medical director for HealthServe on South Eugene Street.

Most of HealthServe’s patients — about 75 percent — have no insurance.

HealthServe makes up just one piece of the Guilford Community Care Network. There are programs for immigrants, dental health and the other county-funded program, Guilford Child Health. The network also connects programs that work with the homeless, such as the Salvation Army’s Center of Hope.

» read all of “County cut to health care would affect thousands” at News-Record.com

I understand the need to avoid a tax increase, and I know that many property tax payers are poor themselves (I suspect that the health care cut will affect some of them directly), but I wonder if there aren’t other places to save tax dollars, that would cause less harm than cutting health care services to our community’s poor and homeless?