The Warren Community Health Clinic building has sat empty since spring 2016. Word of a potential new facility opening up in Warren County has many around the community like Vicky Stokes hopeful.
A reporter set out to do a set of stories on the difficulties Merced County residents already faced in accessing care. Then, eight health clinics serving Medicaid patients in the county closed.
This report was produced as a project for the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
Other stories in the series include:
What happens after a rural North Carolina health clinic closes?
The closure was a big blow for Warren County, an area of the state considered a primary care desert, where doctors are few and patients are often forced to go without health care.
Community clinics in Los Angeles know they have to find new ways to get at the social factors that ultimately shape health if they're going to make a real difference in their patients' lives.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), community clinics have played an important role providing care for newly insured Americans. Funding for programs that enable community clinics to meet patient's needs will expire on September 30th, if Congress doesn’t act.
For years Merced County has struggled to convince doctors to come live and work in the rural, impoverished Central Valley community, resulting in a ratio of about 45 doctors for every 100,000 residents.
A new California law has allowed pharmacists to play a more integral role in managing patients alongside other providers — which could be good news for patients struggling to access doctors. But one major obstacle still stands in the way.
This reporting was undertaken as part of a project with the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Fellowship. ...
While access to insurance coverage remains a national debate, in the San Joaquin Valley, getting to see a doctor isn’t always easy, even for people who have coverage.
