West Virginia Health Right Story Archives - Page 2 of 2

West Virginia Health Right Launches Mobile Dental Clinic

West Virginia Health Right launched a new mobile dental health clinic today at a Charleston ribbon cutting ceremony.

The unit will travel to six underserved West Virginia counties – McDowell, Logan, Boone, Clay, Roane and Harrison, offering services primarily for free. West Virginia Medicaid – the largest provider in these counties – does not cover preventative dental services for adults.

Dr. Raj K. Khanna & Senators Ron Stollings, Tom Takubo & Bob Plymale share a laugh inside the new mobile dental unit.

“I anticipate at probably at least 500 per county, per year. My guesstimate is about 3000 people a year,” said Angie Settle, executive director of West Virginia Health Right. She said the idea was born soon after last year’s floods, but it took them about six months to pull together funders and partners for the new project.

Health Right is partnering with Marshall University who will providing a faculty member to oversee the mobile dental clinic.

“As the program goes maybe next spring they’ll take on more residents to help add more care. Because we have the capacity for two dentists at a time, actually because it’s three chairs and a hygienist so you could have three chairs going at the same time,” said Settle.

To begin with the mobile clinic will travel three days a week – Settle hopes to increase that to five, but said increasing days will be contingent on funding.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Free Clinic Provides Care for Communities Impacted by Floods

The first free health clinic offering comprehensive services ran this past weekend, with more than 600 people receiving care from about 350 volunteer healthcare providers. Motivated to help folks in communities hit by record-breaking flooding last summer, West Virginia Health Right partnered with the nonprofit Remote Area Medical to offer the free health clinic over two days.

The event was based at Elkview Middle School in Kanawha County – the heart of the flood zone. Volunteers in bright green shirts sat in rows at lunch tables checking patients in. They asked for a name and the service desired, but little else. Unlike many free clinics, everyone was welcome, regardless of medical insurance status.

“This is an event that we’re saying right up front – you know no judgement zone – we know there are challenges out there,” said Angie Settle, CEO of West Virginia Health Right.

“We know you might have insurance, but we also know there’s a $5,000, $10,000 deductible, and rather than take that and go buy yourself a pair of glasses or do something for yourself, you may take your child to the doctor, or you’re going without,” she said.

Health Right began planning the clinic just three or four days after the June 2016 floods that devastated much of the central and southeastern parts of the state. It’s the first clinic of its kind in West Virginia, although Remote Area Medical – the partnering non-profit group – has been holding these types of clinics around the world since 1985.

Settle said even without the flood many of these families were struggling.

“So you think… ‘Do I want to have groceries this week, or can I take $125 and go to the eye doctor?’” said Settle. “A lot of times they are just going to skip it.”

We’re in a classroom where 20 dental chairs are set up. Volunteer providers clean teeth, fill cavities, and extract rotten or broken teeth.

“It’s obvious the need’s there, just from the severity of the mouths we’re seeing,” she said. “Somebody had seven teeth extracted at one time. So think about that…. Somebody’s teeth are so diseased that they had to have seven teeth extracted at once.”

Because a lot of insurance plans, including Medicaid, do not cover preventive dental care or eye exams, the vast majority of the patients came for those two services, Settle said.

Two were Patricia Taylor and her adult daughter Amanda.

“We had our teeth pulled, we had our eyes examined, and it was wonderful,” said Patricia. She held a napkin over the front of her mouth where four teeth had been pulled. Neither Taylor had insurance.

Patricia said her retirement plus Social Security is $100 a month too high to qualify for Medicaid and private insurance is too expensive. Her daughter Amanda was struggling with health issues and recently stopped working – she said she does qualify for Medicaid, but had yet to enroll.

When I met them they had already been at the clinic almost 12 hours, having begun waiting at 1 that morning.

“This gave us an opportunity to get some services done that we couldn’t afford, or we’d have to put some type of bill on hold to try and get that done,” said Amanda.

Patricia gave the example of getting poison ivy several weeks earlier. It cost her $107 to go to her primary care provider – money she took from her utility bill.

The clinic had providers had in almost every discipline – chiropractic, physical therapy, orthopedics. All were volunteers.

“Everybody here is putting in their own time, time they could be working and making money to give us an opportunity to get some kind of preventative or maintenance care,” said Amanda.

By far the most popular were dentists and eye doctors. Patients were able to come in, get a full eye exam, and receive a pair of glasses made the same day.

As the day wore on, though, the volunteer providers had to turn away patients seeking dental and vision care. Settle hopes to recruit more of these providers next year, especially since the event will likely grow as word gets out.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Free Medical Clinic Planned This Weekend

A free medical clinic for West Virginia flood victims and others in need is set for this weekend in Kanawha County.

The clinic will be held Saturday and Sunday at Elkview Middle School. Services will be offered beginning at 6 a.m. each day.

It is being hosted by Charleston-based West Virginia Health Right, which provides free medical, dental and vision health services. Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group based in Rockford, Tennessee, will run the clinic.

Organizers say the school’s parking lot will open at midnight each day and tickets will be distributed beginning at 3 a.m. All individuals with tickets will be served.

Up to 500 volunteers are expected to assist at the clinic.

W.Va. Free Health Clinics Asked to Do More with Less

West Virginia has been plagued for the past few years with budget deficits. To deal with the shortfalls, the governor has cut state agency budgets across the board, implemented hiring freezes and dipped into the state’s Rainy Day Fund.

This year, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin cut the House and Senate approved budget by an additional $11 million, leaving some service programs to wonder how they’ll keep their doors open. The Charleston Health Right is just one of those service programs.

The West Virginia Health Right clinic located in Charleston’s East End is a free and charitable clinic that provides medical, dental and vision services to more than 15,000 uninsured and underinsured West Virginians each year.

Beginning July 1, 2015, though, the Charleston clinic, along with nine other clinics across the state, will see a significant reduction in their budget. Executive Director Angie Settle said the cut for her location will be nearly 33 percent.

After two years of 7.5 percent across the board cuts from Tomblin, Settle’s location will have 48 percent less funding than three years ago. Settle said they’ve looked to cut waste wherever possible, but there is little left to find.

Because of the clinics’ ability to bill Medicaid, something the Charleston clinic began doing in January 2014,Tomblin said in his veto message those clinics should be able to recover part of the money cut.

But Settle said that statement just isn’t true for her clinic. In 2014, her clinic brought in $188,000 from Medicaid billing, but spent nearly $100,000 on a person to do the billing and the software and IT upgrades to make it possible.

Settle said even though the start up costs are complete, Medicaid billing won’t make up for her 2016 33 percent budget cut for two reasons. First, because of notoriously low Medicaid reimbursement rates, and second because of the population she serves.

Executive Director of West Virginia Health Right Angie Settle.

“More than half of the patients we see are the working poor,” she said. “West Virginians with two and three jobs.”

Medicaid allows clinics to bill for some services, but Settle said they often won’t reimburse multiple services that occur on the same day. Because she serves a population who may be prohibited from going to multiple appointments because of their work schedule, child care, or ability to pay for transportation, Settle said her patients just won’t return for multiple appointments.

“It reminds me of almost like a NASCAR pit stop when people come here. We [do] everything we can do for them that day. Talk to them about smoking cessation, dental health, get their blood pressure checked, get their blood work done, get their pap smear if its due, give them a slip to go get a mammogram. Everything we can pack into that visit, as much bang for the buck in that day,” she said of their philosophy of care.

Sometimes Medicaid will cover one or all of those services, and sometimes they won’t, Settle said, but she doesn’t see that as incentive to change the way they serve their population, 50 percent of which have Medicaid coverage and 50 percent of which have no insurance at all.

“By squashing funding to free clinics and saying we don’t want to fund free clinics, it basically tells the people of West Virginia, the working poor, we want you to quit your job so you can get on Medicaid,” she said. “It says we don’t want you to work. We want you to quit your job and get on Medicaid or go without.”

Senate Finance Vice Chair Chris Walters said he and his fellow lawmakers tried to work with the clinics to get their line item appropriations in a workable range, knowing the governor intended to make cuts. He said he understands the importance of the clinics to their communities, but lawmakers had to make tough choices to balance the overall budget.

Walters said the state is expecting another budget deficit in 2016, but said lawmakers are working to come up with ways to increase revenues.