Some Hospitals Offer Free Preventive Care To Uninsured

Some hospitals, recently featured in The New York Times, havebegun offering free preventive care to uninsured patients in order to reduce their need more expensive emergency care. Some of these patients had been "frequent flyers" at emergency wards because they lacked the means to obtain basic care which would have prevented them from experiencing acute emergencies. But now, hospitals have instituted programs to improve the health of these patients - while reducing uncompensated care costs for the hospitals.

While the programs established in New York, Denver, and Texas have been very successful, they are able to reach only a small fraction of the 46.6 million of Americans without insurance coverage. This is partly by design - the programs target only those uninsured individuals who have extensive hospitalization expenses - and partly because these programs have not yet caught on nationwide.