In case you don’t have a TV in your office and weren’t glued to C-SPAN all day yesterday, we asked Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman to take a minute to recap a few of the highlights. She spoke with several Disruptive Women and had this to say:

Democrats: We want to get this done by the end of March. We have 9 out of 10 of your wish-list items. Let’s do this.

Republicans: No. We don’t like it. Let’s trash it and start over from scratch.

Democrats: Not possible.

Republicans: Seriously. Let’s start over. Clean page. Fresh slate.

Throughout the day, President Obama pointed out that people on both sides of the table want the same things. He gets letters every day from hard-working people who have lousy (or no) health insurance — people who are losing their house and going bankrupt to pay their medical bills.

He argued that his proposal and the bill that passed in the Senate at Christmastime wasn’t a “radical change” — most people who have health insurance now will still have it, it will just cost a little less. And people who can’t afford it, or who have pre-existing conditions — could get coverage.

While Republicans argued that folks are furious at the idea of Big Government stepping in and forcing people to buy insurance — Obama argued that he just wanted to make sure everyone could have it. The way the FDA makes sure meat isn’t poisoned or drugs won’t kill you. He said there ought to be a little bit of regulation — the same way doctor’s have to go to med school and pass board certifications before they can practice. He just wants to make sure everything is fair, and everything is safe.

At the beginning of the summit, Senator Harry Reid (D-Majority Leader) said, “If you have a better plan for making health insurance more affordable — let’s hear it.”

And the plan that was echoed over and over again is we don’t like this current plan, no one talked to us about it — we should have had this meeting nine months ago — let’s scrap it and do it again. Obama said he didn’t want to “pretend” like he was going to change health care reform and not actually do it.

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Disruptive Women welcomes Personal Trainer Morris White as our February 2010 Man of the Month.

A personal trainer for 22 years, Morris White has both men and women – and even children as young as 12 – as clients. He helps them with basic fitness, sport-specific fitness and self defense. He also trains people with special needs, including those with disabilities and eating disorders, and those recovering from a stroke and heart attack.

In his own life, he is a power lifter and a practitioner of Kung Fu, Yoga, desert hiking and survival quests and sustainable healthy living. He is currently working on a fitness community site.

I can vouch for his impact. I’m now in my third year with him, with regular work outs at 6 AM. The benefits have been worth every trek to the gym in those before-dawn hours.

Morris, I’m pleased to have the chance to talk about fitness with you. It’s an important topic, but rarely addressed in this blogspace. How did you get started training?

There were three very influential men in my young life. It was the 1970’s. My Father was a pharmacist and successful businessman who took me to monthly Toast Masters meetings and had me working in the pharmacy on weekends. He taught me the importance of physical poise and presence. One of his business partners was a Physical Therapist who mentored me in anatomy and exercise, from him I learned about anatomy and body mechanics At about that same time, I was introduced to Kung Fu by my best friend’s Father who was a Master of the art.  Kung Fu combined all the earlier lessons and helped me to develop my personal philosophy on holistic personal training.

Those were the years of my greatest lessons.

I attended Temple University but my advisors could not grasp what I wanted to become and what I wanted to do with my life. The usual response was, “So, you want to teach phys ed?” No.

From there to the gymnasiums I went, working under different titles until personal training evolved and became popular.

 What about fitness and training makes it your passion? 22 years seems a long time.

Seeing my mother die at young age and my father debilitated primarily by an unhealthy lifestyle, has made me even more intent to give meaning to my existence by living and enjoying life to its fullest and helping others to do the same through fitness.  The bonus is that by helping others achieve their personal goals, I get to meet great people that, in turn, enrich my life through their collective experiences and wisdom.

How do you approach training?

My philosophy of training is:

• Safety first. You should never be harmed or injured in the course of training.

• Strict, proper form. The best form produces the best, most efficient results.

• Keep moving. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

Follow those rules and you’ll keep at it, making progress. You’ll avoid injuries and won’t suffer any set-backs in your workouts. You’ll also see results and be able to have an increasingly better quality of life. Even if you’re already fit, you’ll see improvements.  As I like to say to my clients, “one foot in front of the other and you’ll get where you’re going,”

Oh, and one more thing, never imitate what you see others doing in the gym.  So many people do their exercises incorrectly. Others may do an exercise properly but their routine may not fit your desired goals.  Always consult a professional about a new exercise or routine.

Do you have any dramatic examples of client improvements?

I could tell lots of stories of women who come to prepare for their weddings. They’re motivated for sure. Believe it or not, they’ve bought dresses three sizes too small and now need to fit into them. Plus, the regular workouts really help them with the wedding-planning stress.

But the one client and story that really inspired me was a 280 lb sedentary banker who lost the weight and became a marathon runner.

As he became physical healthier, his self-confidence and self-esteem also improved.  This newfound self-respect gave him the strength to not only run a marathon but to walk right out of a less-than-supportive, troubled relationship and climb the corporate ladder to a promotion.

(Laughing) Of course, I cost him lots of money – he kept having to replace his wardrobe as his body changed.

Have you ever seen anyone who did not see an improvement in working out with a trainer?

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Chairman Wu, Congresswomen Edwards and Biggert, and Committee Members. Thank you for this opportunity to testify at this hearing on the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

I ask that my written testimony be accepted into the record.

Today you will hear from accomplished researchers and leaders in their fields of study from Duke University and Stanford. These individuals are scientists, entrepreneurs and biotechnology innovators.

I come here primarily as a mom. I am here today to address the critical link between my experience as a mother striving for treatments, for my kids and millions of others, and the question before this Committee — How our National Institute of Standards and Technology can more effectively influence innovation in life sciences.

I begin with a plain statement about NIST and its activities — it can appear to be boring, non-interesting, and terribly esoteric. NIST suffers from being hidden, embedded into the foundational infrastructure of the scientific and early commercial enterprise of innovation, as well as having the thankless task of creating measurement standards for a whole array of scientific disciplines. However, it is precisely because of these elements that this Committee needs to champion a more active role for NIST in the life sciences.

Some have argued quite convincingly that the next century of scientific and technological innovations will be most profound in the life sciences. NIST is critical to a robust biomedical enterprise and must contribute high quality materials, methods, and expertise for the field to advance on a platform of certainty and high quality measurements.

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The following interview with Dr. Jan Gurley, a board-certified internist physician, was recently featured on the Better Health blog.

Dr. Jan Gurley just returned from a mission trip to Haiti, 5 weeks after the earthquake hit. In this audio clip, she relays a horrific first-hand account of the current realities of life in Port Au Prince. With no running water, bathrooms, or place to shelter – and packed into a field with 100,000 people – some young women are choosing to stop drinking water in an effort to commit suicide.

Dr. Gurley describes the loss of human dignity associated with the crisis in Haiti, including a near stampede when sanitary napkins were offered in a crowd of women. She explains that the place is becoming dangerous – and the screams of women being raped in the night fill the dark air. In the day time, people huddle together for safety while the stench of rotting corpses surrounds them. With the rainy season approaching, and tent cities perched precariously on land-slide prone hills, Dr. Gurley predicts a second wave of disease, violence, despair, and death in Haiti.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I was asked by Norweigan Public TV to do an interview on health reform.  “Happy to do it” I said as I asked for the questions in advance so I could be properly prepared. 

The very first one, Why don’t Americans think everyone should have reasonable health care (which, my interviewer-to-be noted, seemed very strange to Norwegians) was quickly followed by Why is this matter so controversial in the US? 

Oh boy.  This interview has the potential to be very short; that, or I hope my friend from Europe has a passport with some serious time left on it because explaining this thing we call US health reform could take a while. 

Would love your input.  How would you answer?

It is my pleasure to once again roll out the welcome mat to our newest Disruptive Women bloggers.

And just in time…With President Obama and the Congressional leaders set to roll out their version of reality TV on February 25th. (Look out Jersey Shore, we’ve got Potomac Fever.) Stay tuned for the Health Care Summit Disruptive Women Debrief on the 26th.

In the meantime, please read more about these incredible women and join me in extending a warm welcome.

	Anuradha Acharya, named as one of “25 Tech Titans under 35″ by Red Herring magazine, is the Founder & CEO of Ocimum Biosolutions, a global genomics outsourcing partner for discovery, development and diagnostics.
	Becca Camp graduated with an anthropology degree from the University of Texas at Austin in December ’08. She is now finishing her pre-med coursework at Texas Christian University, with plans to apply to medical school this year.
	Lorraine Lee Friedman, JD, (aka Rainey) started her life-long commitment of advocacy for children with The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, is the Founder and Executive Director of the DreamDog Foundation as well as an award-winning author and songwriter.
	Lynn Shapiro Snyder, Esq., a senior member of the law firm, Epstein Becker & Green, P.C., is the Founder and President of the Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation (“WBL Foundation”), an organization meeting the needs of more than 1,800 senior executive women and women board members worldwide who do business with the U.S. health care industry.
	Dr. Pamela Cipriano, Editor-in-Chief of American Nurse Today, the official journal of the American Nurses Association, is a distinguished nursing and hospital administrator having served as Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Clinical Officer of the University of Virginia Health System the past nine years, achieving Magnet Recognition in 2006.

Learn more about our new bloggers, as well as all the Disruptive Women.

Probably the thousands of nurses who have been following this case were encouraged to read the press report of its outcome:

“Texas jury finds nurse not guilty for reporting a physician for unsafe practices.

It took the jury less than an hour on February 11, 2010, to return a not guilty verdict for the nurse, Anne Mitchell, of felony charges of “misuse of official information,” for reporting a physician to the Texas Medical Board for what she believed was unsafe patient care.

Since news of the criminal indictment – and Mitchell’s being fired from her job – first spread through the nursing community, nurses across the country have followed developments. Labeling the criminal indictments “outrageous,” an outpouring of support – and financial contributions to the Texas Nurses Association Legal Defense Fund – has continued.

According to a New York Times article on February 9, the prosecutors claimed that Mitchell intended to damage the physician’s reputation when she reported him to the Texas Medical Board, which licenses and disciplines doctors. Mitchell explained that she felt an obligation to protect patients from what she saw as a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures – including a failed skin graft that was performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges.

Conflicts of interest seemed to be part of this case with allegations that this case was, in part, a result of the local sheriff being good friends with, and a former patient of the physician, and bending the rules to protect his reputation.

A number of nurses who had previous worked at the same Winkle County Rural Health Clinic testified in court that they left the clinic because of their concern about the care provided by the same physician that had never been addressed. The case is no less perplexing as to why Mitchell was even indicted – all witnesses (even the state’s) have agreed nurses have a duty to report unsafe care.

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Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman interviewed Lindsay Avner, founder of Bright Pink. Lindsay Avner’s name might sound familiar to you — the 27-year-old made national news four years ago when she was one of the youngest women to have an elective double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer.

So many women responded to Lindsay’s story, that three years ago she started Bright Pink, a new, fun, breast cancer education, awareness and support group that has grown to 10 chapters nationwide.

Instead of hosting sad support group meetings in dank church basements, bright pink girls take yoga classes or belly dance together. Bright pink sends out monthly text messages reminding women to feel themselves up. Next month, they’re hostessing a burlesque show demonstrating self-exams.

“For so long people have been talking about this in the same kind of mundane way and it’s not making a difference. You have to come in there and shake things up a little bit — and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Lindsay says.

Q: You had a double mastectomy when you were 23?
A: I did.

Q: Why?
A: I have a very strong history of both breast and ovarian cancer. My mom’s mother and grandmother died six days apart, both from breast cancer — they were 39 and 58. And my mom was only 18 when it happened.

In addition, there were 11 other relatives — aunts, and cousins on my mom’s side of the family that have passed away from these diseases.

I remember being a little girl and my mom saying one day I might have to deal with this. It was always present. It was never something that got brushed off and we said, ‘Oh, we’ll just deal with it tomorrow.” My mom was very adamant. She went to the doctor consistently every six months. When they said, ‘Come back in a year.’ She said, ‘I’ll see you in six months.’
Because of that, she really detected her own breast cancer. She had a completely clean mammogram. But she noticed a swelling on the side of her right breast. And she said, ‘I’m not leaving until I find out what this is.’ The doctor said, ‘You’re crazy. We just did a mammogram, you’re absolutely fine.’ She said, ‘You need to check it out.’

Sure enough, they went in and did a biopsy and they hit something and it was Stage 1 breast cancer.
And 10 months later she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Q: Oh no!
A: She went through a lot at 41. I was 12 at the time. I grew up very fast. I switched from being a middle-schooler to Miss Mom helping care for my little brother. It was just really, really draining and hard and not an easy kind of thing. You know what I mean?

I graduated from Michigan in 2005 and decided to undergo genetic testing.

I went into it thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t need to be so focused on my breast cancer risk. On my fathers’ side of the family there’s no cancer.’ It was a 50-50 chance.

Unfortunately, I tested positive for the breast cancer gene — BRAC-1 in July 2005.

I made the decision in August 2006 — I was one of the youngest patients nationwide ever to have the preventative surgery. Do I want to do surveillance? Do I want to do surgery? What’s this going to mean? I’m single now.

It was very, very hard. I felt very alone through all of it. I wasn’t a cancer survivor, but yet I wasn’t like everybody else.

Before the surgery, I longed to speak to somebody who was young, and “normal”, and fun and had gone through it and came out on the other side and happy and okay, and actually did love her body and felt okay, and met Mr. Right.

I felt very alone. So I said, ‘I need to make this different for so many other people.’ I originally told my story about my surgery to the Chicago Tribune and the next day I was on the Today show.
It’s a shocking story. Here’s a woman whose healthy, who makes a decision when she’s young to remove her healthy breast tissue. More than 1,000 young women in their 20s and 30s reached out to the writers and producers. Time and time again, the story wasn’t necessarily I had genetic testing, it was, ‘My mom had breast cancer or my grandma had ovarian cancer.’

That’s really where the idea for Bright Pink came from. To know this information, is an opportunity generations of women never had. To be able to identify your risk, develop a strategy to be proactive, and live the rest of your life and be happy and live cancer free.

Q: What are you doing new with Bright Pink right now?
A: One of our favorite new initiatives is the underwire alert.

Q: So it’s a text message reminding you to do a breast exam?
A: It is. All they have to do is text the work PINK to the short code 59227 and they’re automatically enrolled to send them a fun, and cheeky message to just be aware of their breasts. To touch them, and look at them, and feel them and speak up if something changes. We’re trying to get thousands and thousands of women. This is one great, easy activity that all women can do.

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On December 2nd, 2009 Disruptive Women in Health Care launched a new series on The Value of Health: Creating Economic Security in the Developing World at the Women in the Arts Museum in Washington DC.

As part of the evening, we talked about the book, HALF THE SKY.  Now they’ve made it a movie.

Let’s help fill the theaters for this very special event!

At HALF THE SKY Live, a one-night-only event inspired by stories from the New York Times best seller “Half the Sky” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The evening will be hosted by Andrea Mitchell and feature musical performances, celebrity commentary and the world premiere of “Woineshet,” a short film by Academy Award®-winner Marisa Tomei and Lisa Leone. You’ll also enjoy appearances from India.Arie, Maria Bello, Diane Birch, Michael Franti, Dr. Helene Gayle, Angelique Kidjo, Nicholas Kristof, Marisa Tomei, Melanne Verveer, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York and others.

 Experience HALF THE SKY Live on Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. (local time) in select movie theaters across the country.

http://www.ncm.com/Fathom/OriginalPrograms/event/Half_The_Sky.aspx

Immediately after the snow stopped falling in Washington DC this week, another news story took DC by storm–the resignation of Billy Tauzin, effective June 30th.

Mr. Tauzin’s departure comes at a critical time for those involved with health reform efforts, not to mention PHRMA’s own thick portfolio of issues that include patents and trade, the economy, taxes (think offshore), and shrivelling pipelines, just to name a few.

The job pays well, but the applicant will surely inherit a daunting to-do list.

Job Qualifications

It’s a given that she would have impeccable bipartisan connections at the highest levels of government (both here and abroad); a robust rolodex full of private sector titans and Wall Street mavericks; a keen understanding of marketplace complexities (both here and abroad); superior people skills (it can be a b*tch managing those board room egos); not to mention a thorough grasp of and respect for the unique political and policy complexities that define health, health care, and innovation.

But that won’t  be enough.  I would love to see the next CEO take some bold action and harness the power of e-patients:  increasingly, patients (e-patients and their e-caregivers) are hungry to engage in participatory, user-generated health care, often referred to as Health 2.0.  Kaiser’s Dr. Ted Eytan explains it this way, “enabled by information, software and community that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own health care and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.”[1]

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Kids learn best when they are having fun.  This should come as no surprise to anyone.

When I go into schools with my new program: “Creative Core Curriculum”^TM and we learn through story and song, writing and rapping, music and movement – the kids have no clue that I am just following their curriculum, with a little creative spin.  Why?  Because, unfortunately, students are don’t equate fun and learning.

Time to shift that outdated paradigm. In today’s world, children are experiential learners.  They learn by doing, creating, moving — diving into topics and exploring them, firsthand.  That’s why the worksheet mentality of the 1950’s just doesn’t make sense anymore (if it ever did). And, yet when our school system and government needed to “teach” our children the life or death lesson of staying healthy through flu season, they sent home a one-page flyer with the information.  Handing them a piece of paper and assuming they wouldn’t ball it up, or create a paper airplane or fortuneteller is wishful thinking, at best.

Why not have a little skit at school with one kid sneezing in another’s face and the child that got sneezed on gets just as sick as “Sneezy”? Or what about creating a game on a website where children could go to play a flu game.  If they do the wrong things, their character would get sick.  If they stay healthy, they advance to harder levels – challenging their understanding of the rules to staying well.

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One-third of Americans say they have received tests, treatment or medications they didn’t need, according to a survey conducted for the Commonwealth Fund of New York.  Are you one of them?

Think about it.  We live in a market-driven economy where businesses thrive on getting us to consume more than we need, whether it’s a house that’s too big, a mortgage that’s unaffordable, or an investment that promises more than it can deliver.  Market-driven health care is motivated by the same imperative.  In our highly-caffeinated health care system, the mantra is volume, volume, volume.  That ‘volume’ is you and me, and the people we love.

Here’s a story about a colleague, a research scientist, who has a heart condition that she watches very carefully. She went for a nuclear stress test at a free-standing diagnostic testing center as part of her routine monitoring.  After the test was complete, the cardiologist told her she had a very serious problem that required open-heart surgery.  She was scared out of her wits and immediately thought of a family friend who had died recently during heart surgery.  The cardiologist wanted to do a cardiac catheterization and prescribe medication.  He also told her to stop jogging immediately.

My savvy friend knew she didn’t want to have more tests or treatment at that center.  Here’s why.  While on the treadmill, she overheard the doctor tell the nurse that the center had nine patients a day and needed to increase its census to fourteen a day to generate enough revenue to make it financially viable.  It’s true.  She walked out and never looked back. A second opinion from expert physicians recommended continued monitoring and she followed their advice.

About ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences convened a group of experts who acknowledged a uniquely American phenomenon in health care: overuse.  It occurs when the possibility of harm exceeds the possible benefit.  Health care insiders say that overuse is an epidemic.  Epidemics are not good for anyone.

To learn what you can do to avoid unnecessary medical treatment, check out my new book coming out next month, The Treatment Trap, which has twenty smart steps for consumers.  Read the foreword by Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union.  In the meantime, share your story.  Together we can learn from – and empower – each other.

During this blizzard of 2010, I thought about the difficulties an ambulance would have reaching someone in need on an unplowed street—let alone if the person were significantly obese and hard to transport on even an ordinary day.  Then today I read an astounding Washington Post article that noted “a patient between 400 pounds and 600 pounds is part of every workweek for many crews throughout the [DC metro] region.”  Really? I thought this only happened on occasion in select areas shown on the Discovery Channel.  Apparently, not the case.

Emergency medical crews are making hefty investments (no pun intended) in super-sized, ambulatory equipment.   According to the article, “sales of stretchers designed specifically for very large patients were expected to reach $50 million in 2012, up from $29.6 million in 2004, while sales of specialized lift systems were projected to rise from $75 million to $193 million.”

And, it is interesting that just as healthcare spending is rising at a faster rate than the U.S. economy overall, the rate of morbidly obese patients who are at least 100 pounds overweight is increasing faster than obesity as whole, according to a RAND study.

What is more alarming is that, for the first time ever in U.S. history, children may have a shorter lifespan than their parents, and much of the reason is due to obesity and its related health problems.  More than 23 million children (one third of all children and adolescents in the country) are overweight or obese and at greater risk for Type II diabetes and other chronic, life-threatening health conditions.

So, how can we keep our children from ending up in super-sized stretchers one day?

In a previous post, I discussed environmental factors that hinder our ability as a nation to stay un-obese, so I’ll expand on that with some ideas I’ve heard in the classroom.

One suggested strategy has been a soda or sugar-sweetened beverage tax.

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According to the non-profit organization Vitamin Angels, one in three children across the globe are malnourished. Just think of how much that percentage has increased by the Haitian crisis Indeed, Vitamin Angels has already shipped one million childrens’ multivitamins to Haiti since the earthquake.

A viable and invaluable solution to malnourishment is to provide these children with essential nutrients both here at home and abroad.  According to research, one, high-dose Vitamin A capsule can reduce the risk of mortality among children under age five by 23%. Moreover, it can provide a sufficient dose to boost immunity for as long as six months, at a cost of only $.02 per capsule.

Multivitamins too, can help combat severe vitamin deficiencies and related diseases among the under five set, while also boosting cognitive and physical performance. In fact, according to a UNICEF Global progress report, almost 600,00 deaths from iron and zinc deficiencies could be prevented with proper supplementation coupled with food fortification. Another 18 million lives impaired by iodine deficiency could also be prevented.

These data are dire and the needs great. Supplements aren’t the only answer and better government coordination, food fortification, awareness and education are needed.

When most people think “global,” they don’t think “home.” But in order to be most effective globally, we also need to consider our own and our children’s wellness needs. I’ve been fortunate to become part of an Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Nutrition Foundation’s Life Supplemented initiative.  Late December 2009, they launched America’s Wellness Campaign, which is a three-tiered program aimed at helping individuals here at home take charge and monitor their health through diet, exercise and supplements. By offering people an opportunity to gauge and monitor the areas in which they need improvement and in turn, providing research-based informational strategies, Life Supplemented aims to help improve the nation’s health.  But the effort extends beyond our borders as well; Life Supplemented has recently teamed up with Vitamin Angels to provide much needed funding for the programs by offering to donate one dollar for every individual who completes a Wellness Scorecard. Pretty simple; improve your own health and help improve others’ at the same time.

In 2009 alone, Vitamin Angels’ efforts reached approximately 11,000,000 infants and children in 40 countries  (including the United States) by providing them with  vital nutrients needed as a foundation for good health.  I’d like to think that we help them exceed this milestone in 2010 and perhaps even reach some of our own.

President Obama’s 2011 HHS budget builds on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) investment in federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), providing an additional $290 million for further expansions.  With this increase, the administration estimates that health centers will be able to serve more than 20 million individuals in FY 2011.

Combined with other AARA provisions, this is good news for some of our nation’s “safety net” providers, including FQHCs, as well as public and nonprofit hospitals that treat many low income patients.  But there’s also a growing hole in the safety net as free medical clinics struggle to survive the current economic recession.

In a recently released research brief on safety net providers by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Center for Studying Health System Change^[1], the authors note, “while many FQHCs have benefitted from both the recent ARRA funding and federal expansion grants over the past 10 years, many free clinics without FQHC status were facing more serious financial strains than safety net hospitals and FQHCs.”  The report goes on to quote one FQHC executive as saying, “FQHCs got money, and free clinics are worried about keeping their doors open…There’s a big have and have-nots disparity.”

FQHCs include community health centers, public housing centers and some outpatient programs.  These providers receive federal payments for qualified services and are eligible for stimulus funds and federal expansion grants.  In contrast, free clinics do not receive federal payments and they are not eligible for funding available to FQHCs.  Instead, they depend primarily on private philanthropy and a team of volunteer physicians to provide care to the uninsured.

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