Community health centers have been providing crucial health care services to low-income Americans for more than 50 years. Health centers now have more than 10,000 sites in rural and underserved communities in U.S. states and territories. However, proposed changes to the federal Medicaid program may impact the centers’ ability to continue to serve close to 26 million people who turn to them for health care.
“For many Americans, particularly women and children, community health centers serve as a medical safety net,” says Anne R. Markus, an associate professor in the Milken Institute School of Public Health’s (Milken Institute SPH) Department of Health Policy and Management. She has secured a $73 thousand grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to test a model that will simulate the federal and state changes designed to transform the Medicaid program, and then estimate the impact on health center revenue and capacity.
Read more about the RWJF project
Markus is also the recipient of a one year pilot project awarded under the 2017 GW Cancer Center Catchment Area Impact Grant, which has as a primary aim to analyze disparities in cancer screening behaviors in the DC region by insurance status in a post-ACA environment in which full coverage of recommended screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer, and colorectal cancer is mandatory.
Both the RWJF and GW Cancer Center projects augment the already considerable research portfolio of the Geiger-Gibson Program in Community Health Policy housed in HPM and directed by Professor Sara Rosenbaum.