In its Community Needs Assessment conducted last year, the United Way of Central Arkansas identified affordable health care as the No. 1 need in the county. According to the results of the survey, 72 percent of respondents rated affordable health care as a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most important issue in the community.
Lack of insurance
Kittie Aaron, executive director of the Conway Interfaith Clinic, said 18 percent of people in Faulkner County have no health insurance.
"We have 100,000 people in Faulkner County, so that's 18,000 people (without insurance). It's sad," she said. "The cost of health care has gone up so much, not only for the individual, but for business owners. Health care costs are rising faster than workers' pay."
She said one study showed that from 2001 to 2005, health care premiums rose 30 percent, while incomes rose only 3 percent.
Ray Kordsmeier of Kordsmeier Furniture in Conway serves on the Conway Regional Medical Center's board of directors and the board of trustees of the American Hospital Association.
He said it has become more difficult for small business owners to offer insurance benefits to their employees.
"That's a tough benefit for most small businesses to be able to offer," he said.
He said his business used to offer employees a policy, but now employees have insurance benefits through their spouse, a retirement benefit or a veteran benefit.
"They buy what they want, and we contribute toward paying for that so many dollars per month," he explained.
Caring for
the uninsured
The Conway Interfaith clinic, open Monday through Thursday, provides services for the working uninsured, but Aaron said it is not enough.
"We don't have enough money to hire the staff to take care of everyone. We have 17 to 18 new patients per week. Last month alone we had to turn down 70 people," she said. The Pine Street Free Clinic provides free medical care and prescription drugs for people with little or no income and who are uninsured. It is open on Tuesdays.
As a nonprofit hospital, Conway Regional Medical Center also provides charity care at its emergency room.
Lori Ross, corporate director of marketing and public relations said the hospital spent $4 million in charity care for the community last year. These are people in need of emergency treatment who the hospital knows up front cannot afford to pay, she said.
"It's a huge issue in this community," she said. "$4 million is a lot of care."
Accessing
health care
Even for those who have insurance, however, getting needed care can be difficult.
Lou Strain of Counseling Associates explained many people have a need for mental health care and do not have access.
"Any time there is a shortage of the basic needs safety, shelter, food it puts a stressor on everything else. Where you're going to feel that is mentally and physically. Depending on what kind of coping skills they have, a lot of times people who are unemployed or have jobs that pay less and have less backups like savings, rich parents, things to sell it goes into a more serious stress reaction that can lead to depression, which leads to more serious symptoms," she said.
Strain said Counseling Associates has a small amount of money for indigent care each year, and it always runs out in six months. The crisis she sees, she said, is people who have insurance but cannot access it.
"People have such limited incomes even if they have the opportunity to have insurance, people are having to pick the cheapest plan, and those plans are not adequate."
She said most plans either do not cover mental health, or the deductibles are so high that, in order to reach the deductible and have their mental health needs covered, the patient would have "had to be in the hospital to reach it."
"We see $2,000 deductibles," she said. "If you have to pay that much to access your health care, you might as well not have mental health coverage."
She added the people forced to chose inadequate health care plans that do not cover their mental health care needs are automatically disqualified from the indigent care program because they have insurance, putting those patients in a Catch-22 situation.
Causes, answers
In its report, the United Way suggested as potential causes: "The rise in litigation for medical malpractice awards that raise the cost of providing health care services" and "the need for health care service providing entities to pass uncollected cost on to insured consumers, which raises the cost of services and ultimately raises the cost of health insurance premiums."
The United Way posed the following actions to address the issue: "Expansion of ARKids First program; continued development of clinics such as Conway Interfaith Clinic that are geared toward free or substantially reduced fee-for-service care; low-cost urgent care services as an alternative to the local emergency room; increase awareness of Working Disabled Medicaid Program; working with employers to find lower cost health care benefit programs for employees or instituting incentives for healthy lifestyle changes."
Changes coming?
Kordsmeier said, "I really, truly believe that how we fund health care is going to change after this next election. They will be incremental changes, but they will be large incremental changes. People associate the cost of health care with the cost of their health insurance. That's not good way to look at it, but it's the way most people get their hands around it.
"With higher copays and deductibles, insurance still going up and wages going up just a little, it's tough for people to make it work. If something happens, people have a lot of out of pocket.
"I think after this national election, the U.S. population is going to put pressure on their representatives to change health care."
(Staff writer Rachel Parker Dickerson can be reached by e-mail at rachel.dickerson@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1277. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)
