Free Clinics to Save Healthcare

This is a wonderful idea, far more sensible than Hillarycare! From TCS Daily:

Warren County, Virginia, at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Shenandoah River has neither the rolling hills of horse country nor the fertile plains of the Shenandoah Valley.

Of its 36,000 citizens, an estimated 6,000 are uninsured. Typically, when they get sick, the uninsured go to the emergency room, which is about the most inefficient and costly way of delivering primary medical care.

But, thanks to the initiative of some local Christians, the uninsured of Warren County can instead go to the St. Luke Community Clinic for free medical care. In FY 2006, 2,633 uninsured people did just that.

St. Luke Clinic is one of an estimated two thousand Free Clinics around the country, fifty of them in Virginia. In 2006, the total budget of all the Free Clinics in Virginia was about $18 million, which they leveraged to a value in excess of $80 million.

An idea whose time has come! I shudder to think of the bloated bureaucracy, and unfeeling civil servants who would control government sponsored medical care. Tending the sick and the poor should best be left to those who really care, and the church and charities have been at the forefront of this issue far longer than Washington.