Crossroads Medical Mission Clinic leaders tells News 5’s Yannia Nordelo they\u2019ve seen a major surge in uninsured patients, and the numbers only keep growing.<\/p>\n
According to the Virginia Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, patient numbers jumped 47 percent between 2022 and 2024.<\/p>\n
Executive Director of Crossroads Medical Mission in Bristol, Erin Faust, says this spike in patients is because of changes to the Affordable Care Act Marketplace and Medicaid work requirements, which left millions of people suddenly uninsured.<\/p>\n
When people become uninsured, they\u2019re not just coming right away to find primary care. We\u2019re going to see these numbers as the need rises when they run out of medicine, and then they have to go get refills, that’s when we\u2019re going to keep seeing these numbers go up, said Faust.<\/p>\n
To prepare, clinic leaders say they have to find ways to make every cent count.<\/p>\n
We just have to get very creative and how we are going to spend or how we\u2019re going to use our funding, and then we will continue to work with volunteers, said Faust. We\u2019re really good at stretching our dollars. If we have a budget of $700,000, we provide over $1 million worth of care.<\/p>\n
However, long-term stability could be a challenge.<\/p>\n
I would say our hurdles would be discontinuing community support and funding and developing funding streams, said Faust.<\/p>\n
Cindy Rockett has been part of the clinic since its start 24 years ago.<\/p>\n
She says this is the highest volume of patents she’s ever seen, but believes they have enough funding to continue to provide care for those in need.<\/p>\n
We worry for the patients, we don\u2019t worry about whether we\u2019ll be here to help the patients or not, said Rockett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Crossroads Medical Mission Clinic leaders tells News 5’s Yannia Nordelo they\u2019ve seen a major surge in uninsured patients,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-295430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}