ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603080023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F2 EDITION: METRO
FREE CLINICS are no cure for the nation's lack of universal health-care coverage. But as Roanoke's Bradley Free Clinic has over the years illustrated, they can be life-savers for the working, uninsured poor.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, has done a good service in introducing a bill in the House of Representatives that would exempt health-care professionals who provide free services through such a clinic from liability for simple negligence. Virginia and seven other states have similar laws.
Goodlatte's Charitable Medical Care Act would extend the protection to health-care volunteers nationwide, making it easier to set up the privately funded outpatient clinics, which primarily serve the working poor. There are 200 free clinics in the United States, and the Free Clinic Foundation of America, headquartered at the Bradley Free Clinic, is working to build a nationwide network.
Enactment of Goodlatte's bill would help. Free clinics sometimes have trouble recruiting medical staff because would-be volunteers are worried about medical liability. Retired professionals can't volunteer because they don't have liability coverage, and those with active practices fear that volunteering at a free clinic might jeopardize their malpractice insurance.
Whether it actually would is unclear, but the fear does keep some doctors and other professionals from offering their services. The exemption would allay their concerns, without protecting health-care providers against liability for gross negligence or willful misconduct.
In America's hit-or-miss system of health insurance, which leaves more than 30 million citizens uninsured, free clinics are no substitute for meaningful health-care reform. But they do offer access to routine health care that is denied to so many - at the expense of all. Without free clinics in places like Roanoke and Lexington and Lynchburg, hard-working people who aren't insured by their employers and can't afford private policies would end up with no health care, or the costliest care of all - at hospital emergency rooms.
Free clinics are good medicine. Congress should pass this legislation to help dispense it.
LENGTH: Short : 44 linesby CNB