HealthCare Cutback Crowds Clinic

LAKELAND | Add Talbot House Ministries to the list of groups affected by the enrollment freeze and eligibility cutbacks in Polk County's health care plan for uninsured county residents.

As Polk HealthCare has cut back dramatically, some of its former patients or people who wanted to be its patients are showing up at the Lakeland homeless shelter's Good Samaritan Clinic.

The Lakeland clinic can't handle the demand for medical care.

"People were lined up outside the door," Paula Beikirch, Talbot House's executive director, said Thursday. "We cannot service that type of person, too. ... We're having to immediately shut down to where we were before and only serve the homeless and our existing clients."

Good Samaritan was set up for the homeless but it also has assisted a few uninsured people from the surrounding neighborhood. From now on, however, except for patients already on board, it needs to be strictly for the homeless, Beikirch said.

A similar situation occurred at Lakeland Volunteers in Medicine, which has volunteer health-care workers and other community volunteers who take care of uninsured county residents.

LVIM stopped taking new patients in early August until it could reduce a delay of six to eight weeks between when new patients came on board and when doctors could see them. Chief Administrative Officer Bobby Yates said he expects it will be late October before the backlog clears.

The Polk HealthCare Plan is funded by the half-cent indigent-care local sales tax that Polk voters approved. As its enrollment steadily increased, reaching slightly more than 19,000 people approved for care, so did the types of care covered and the resulting treatment costs.

County officials began warning in mid-winter that eligibility requirements and services needed to be cut, some of which was done, but the full extent of the overspending didn't become apparent until this summer. Now the plan faces a deficit projected to exceed $15 million.

After last week's extensive round of budget cutting for Polk HealthCare, LVIM kept sales-tax funding it gets from the county for medical care, but it lost money for its expanded dental program.

Yates said non-profit LVIM still will keep its dental program going for people who qualify for care at LVIM. Its eligibility requirements include not being eligible for any other type of insurance coverage, including Medicaid and Medicare.

The Haley Center, a church-sponsored group that provides health care in a Winter Haven storefront clinic one or two days a week, kept its funding. Also spared was We Care, which matches uninsured patients with doctors willing to volunteer care. Officials at both are seeing increased demands.

[ Robin Williams Adams can be reached at robin.adams@theledger.com or 863-802-7558. Read her blog at robinsrx.theledger.com. ]