Obamacare Caused This Clinic To Close, And Its Doctors Couldn't Be Happier
DYLAN SCOTT – MAY 16, 2014, 6:00 AM EDT
On the last Wednesday in January, the RotaCare Tacoma free clinic in Washington state put away the chairs in the university janitor's lunchroom where it had made its home and closed its doors for the last time.
The clinic, served by volunteer physicians and registered nurses, had carried 150 patients at any given time to serve the uninsured population in this city of about 200,000. But after Obamacare took full effect in January, and this clinic completed its drive to enroll of its patients in coverage, it didn't have anyone left to serve.
So they shut down at the end of January, the first month that health coverage under Obamacare kicked in. The people who worked there don't seem too torn up about it.
"It happened very quickly. We had to start telling our providers not to come because we didn't have enough patients," Mary Hoagland-Scher, a Tacoma family practitioner who served as the clinic's medical director, told TPM. "It just dried up. Poof."
That makes RotaCare Tacoma an unusual case, but not an entirely unique one. Free clinic directors in Iowa and Ohio said they haven't seen anything like it on a systematic level. But there is the story of a free clinic in Medina, Ark., which closed in April after seeing its number dwindle from 300 to 80 to three as people obtained coverage through Obamacare in the first three months of 2014.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/washington-free-clinic-closed-obamacare
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