Philadelphia Mayoral Candidate Plans Health Centers to Treat the Uninsured
By Bob Warner, Philadelphia Daily News
Mar. 20–Mayoral candidate Tom Knox says he’d open 40 small neighborhood health centers, providing basic service to the uninsured for no more than $7.50 a visit.
That’s the centerpiece of a mass mailing the Knox campaign plans for next week, aimed at 300,000 Democratic households.
Knox insists the city can afford the program, by attracting enough patients with insurance to offset losses on the uninsured.
“At most, it would cost taxpayers a couple million dollars a year,” Knox said in an interview yesterday. “To pay that and provide this level of health care is pretty good.”
The city has nine district health centers, including one specializing in sexually transmitted diseases. They are staffed by doctors and nurses. Uninsured people can use them without charge, but it can take months to get an initial appointment, leading many with acute health problems to make expensive visits to hospital emergency rooms.
Knox’s model is based on a new niche in the health-care industry, known as “convenient-care centers,” now expanding rapidly under private ownership.
Knox says his program would include several doctors, but most of the service would be provided by nurse practitioners, licensed to handle problems like respiratory infections, vaccinations, rashes, minor burns, abrasions and sprains.
By Knox’s calculations, each of the 40 centers would cost about $400,000 a year, half of it to pay the salaries and benefits of nurse practitioners, the other half to cover office space and supplies, an office manager and other expenses, including malpractice insurance.
He says the centers would be open 12 hours on weekdays, eight hours on weekends. They’d break even, he figures, if they could attract 20 to 30 patients a day with some form of health insurance. Then the city could collect a negotiated fee from health insurers, something like $55 a visit, on top of a $7.50 co-pay from the patient.
Knox said he’d discussed his plan with health-care executives including Joseph Frick, president of Independence Blue Cross, and Hal Rosenbluth, the former travel- agency executive now running Take Care Health Systems, a private, Conshohocken-based company that expects to have 200 convenient care centers in operation by the end of the year.
Knox said both men were enthusiastic about his proposal and believed it would work.
Liz Williams, a spokeswoman at Blue Cross, said Frick had met with all the mayoral candidates, and spent most of his time with Knox discussing IBC’s Charitable Medical Care Grant Program, which has provided $5 million to nonprofit clinics serving the uninsured.
Asked about Frick’s view of the Knox plan, Williams said, “I just don’t think he [Frick] learned enough about it to have a sense of its feasibility.”
Rosenbluth’s spokeswoman was more positive, but still non-committal.
“The little knowledge [Rosenbluth] has of the plan so far, he thinks it’s great,” said Take Care’s Lauren Tierney. “Anything that’s going to provide high-quality, accessible health care for the people of Philadelphia, he’s all for it.”
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