Welcome to the new Access to Care Web Site.
President's letter
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the new Access to Care website! We are proud of our 20 years of delivering primary health care to low-income, uninsured people in suburban Cook County and the northwest side of Chicago. We have served over 92,000 unduplicated individuals, many of them for several years.
Access to Care has served different groups of people in our 20 years of existence. In the beginning, over 50% of patients were children. Now, all children are covered by the All Kids program from the state. Their parents are covered by the state’s FamilyCare program. We applaud these efforts. However, many more adults are without insurance coverage now than in 1988. Currently in Access to Care, single people and couples are the first and second most frequently represented categories in our program. Single people are not eligible for Medicaid in Illinois unless they are pregnant or disabled. Access to Care is their only option for low-cost continuity of care.
Access to Care provides: linkage to a medical home for primary care, diagnostic laboratory tests and routine x-rays, and prescription medication. Patients make small co-payments to the providers of these services. Access to Care pays the rest through a series of discounted arrangements. In 2007 alone, the program provided almost 68,000 prescriptions at discounted prices.
Access to Care’s funding comes from a variety of sources, the largest being the State of Illinois and Cook County. Much of the private side of medicine’s contributions come as in-kind contributions from the discounted services of physicians, commercial laboratories, hospital radiology departments, and Walgreen’s pharmacy. Together with public donors, they form the public-private partnership that makes Access to Care so effective.
Access to Care is extremely grateful to all the participating physicians, for without them the program would not exist.
I hope that you will learn about Access to Care and decide to become involved; whether as a patient, as a physician, as a donor, or as a volunteer.
Sincerely.
Victoria Bigelow
President
Victoria Bigelow, MA