The Fate of a Stimulus-Funded Health Clinic

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Unwittingly, Mary Bufwack first applied for stimulus money a year and a half ago. George Bush was in office, Barack Obama was campaigning in Iowa, and the economic crisis was still fermenting on the books of AIG (AIG). It was in December 2007 that Bufwack, the CEO of United Neighborhood Health Services, a network of local health clinics here, sent in an application to Bush's Health and Human Services Department.

The uninsured need health clinics like the homeless need homeless shelters. Clinic rates are adjustable, they almost exclusively serve the needy, and they want to help as many people as possible. Bufwack wanted extra grant money to build a health clinic on Dickerson Road, the thoroughfare of a hardscrabble district on the north side of the city. For whatever reason—lack of mobility, inaccessibility to public transport, neighborhood territoriality—the Dickersonians weren't coming to UNHS's pre-existing clinics. Rather than go to a doctor, they would wait until their illnesses got so bad that they'd have to use the emergency room. And as one of UNHS's educational pamphlets says, "The ER is not a doctor's office"...

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