Friday, April 16, 1999
Council tries to replace clinics
Hamilton gets 5,000 patients
BY JANICE MORSE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HAMILTON — Butler County is facing a health care crisis.
Two not-for-profit private clinics in Hamilton have announced they are closing, leaving 5,000 patients — most of them poor, uninsured or underinsured — without health and dental care.
The Joseph Center and the H.A. Long Health Center will close May 10 because their operator, Lincoln Heights Community Health Care Inc., can't afford to continue running them.
“We're very pained about it,” said Dolores Lindsay, the company's executive director. But she said her company cannot keep pace with expenses after it lost a large chunk of a federal grant and must absorb the cost of caring for uninsured patients. A consultant told the company to concentrate on its Hamilton County clinics, in Mount Healthy and Lincoln Heights, officials said.
At a meeting Wednesday night, two days after city officials learned about the closings, city council took emergency action to expand services at the city-run East Avenue Health Clinic. But council members did so knowing that the temporary plan can't meet all the needs. “It's a mess,” said Councilman Richard Holzberger. “And it's not just a Hamilton problem, it's a Butler County problem — and those clinics are treating people from Warren County and Indiana, too.”
As a stopgap measure, Mr. Holzberger and other council members voted 7-0 to adopt a plan that City Manager Steve Sorrell and Dr. William Karwisch, the city's public health director, worked out in two days.
Two public health nurse jobs will remain vacant, and $100,000 that had been budgeted for those positions will instead pay for a family doctor and dentist at the East Avenue clinic.
“This is only temporary, but we had to do something,” Mr. Holzberger said. “If we hadn't, both hospitals in the city would have been inundated, and sick people could become sicker. I heard the physicians (at a health leadership meeting) state that people could die. That's why we had to move now.”
Nathaniel Sherman, the city's former human relations director, pleaded with council to find a way to save the clinics, adding, “You are not going to be able to handle it.”
Besides temporary expansion of services, the city's plan calls for creation of a local nonprofit health care organization which would obtain funds to build and staff a clinic by 2002.
“We are committed to take care of the needy,” Mr. Holzberger said. “We will continue to work until we have a total plan put into place. ... And as for our temporary plan, I feel good about it. I feel good about what we've put together in two short days.”
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