Michael Curry is the President & CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. This blog is part of a series where we interview clients and colleagues on the topic of how Massachusetts can build on our strengths in turbulent times.
How is the current federal landscape impacting your work or your industry?
Community health centers are significantly impacted by changes and impending cuts at the federal level. Health centers are funded in part by a base grant that supports their overhead, programs and services. Any instability in this funding has reverberative effects across all health centers and when long-term, multi-year funding is not in place it is very hard for health center leadership to plan beyond the very short term.
The impact of federal grant funding varies by health center: This funding makes up an average of 13% of health center budgets but can be as much as 40%. When that is combined with Medicaid funding, another critical pillar of health center revenues, representing an average of 31%, so any cuts or changes to these two programs create new financial instability into a system that is already grappling with the financial challenges that exist due to long-term underfunding and increased costs due to inflation and increased costs associated with workforce.
With this instability comes a risk of having to limit or close services. If patients cannot access needed primary care services at their local community health center, they may be driven to an emergency department which lacks continuity of care for them and is the most expensive setting for health care.
What do you see as Massachusetts’ biggest strengths in this moment?
The community health center movement was born out of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s and is grounded in a commitment to equity, diverse leadership, and community self-determination as well as racial and social justice. The first health center in the country was founded in Dorchester, MA in 1965. This history of innovation in health care is embedded in the fabric of Massachusetts and is one of its greatest strengths.
Our community health centers have continued to build on this history of advocacy, activism, and innovation which has driven creative problem solving and a tenacity of spirit for our diverse health center leaders and staff that helps them to face challenging times. This strength coupled with health centers’ historic ability to do more with less will serve health centers well in this environment of threatened resources. However, health centers will reach an inflection point, at which, they will be faced with hard decisions to cut services and staff in response to funding cuts, which will also threaten the strength of the overall health care system in Massachusetts.
What would you say to other Massachusetts leaders about where we go from here?
As Massachusetts has always done in times of challenge, leaders in the Commonwealth need to keep innovating and addressing critical issues like access to health care for all and decreasing health disparities.
With the support of a Governor and state legislators who understand the importance of access to primary care and preventative services for all, health care leaders in Massachusetts need to continue to push innovation and find solutions to the critical issues in our communities.
Massachusetts has always been a trailblazer in the delivery of health care, and we need to keep doing that important work locally even if nationally it is being challenged. The Commonwealth will need to share our advances with other states in the future to continue to improve the health of all.