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First lady Michelle Obama cuts the ribbon to open the Caroline Family Practice in Bowling Green yesterday.
First lady Michelle Obama speaks to invited guests at the new Caroline Family Practice in Bowling Green, |
BY JIM HALL
First lady Michelle Obama helped open the new community health center in Bowling Green yesterday, saying that the clinic will offer the kind of health care the nation needs.
Caroline Family Practice will emphasize primary and preventative care, she said.
And it will increase access for poor and uninsured who might otherwise have to go to a hospital emergency room.
"They wind up lurching from illness to illness and crisis to crisis, getting emergency care instead of health care," Mrs. Obama said.
"And we wind up spending billions of dollars each year to treat diseases that for far less money we could prevent in the first place," she said.
The first lady spent about 90 minutes at the new Caroline County clinic, arriving in a motorcade from Washington.
The clinic is the 14th in a chain of community health centers operated by Central Virginia Health Services Inc.
It opened last week, funded in part by federal stimulus money.
Mrs. Obama met privately with the clinic staff and with a group of young doctors and dentists who told her about their membership in the National Health Service Corps. The federal loan and scholarship program helps pay doctors' tuition bills in exchange for service in medically underserved areas.
Invited guests, including another first lady, Anne Holton, the wife of Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, also heard her stump for her husband's package of health reforms, saying that changes are needed to address rising costs and lack of access.
"Health insurance reform is not just about those 46 million Americans who do not have insurance," she said. "It's also about those folks who do."
Mrs. Obama also pointed out that 85 percent of the nation's health care dollars are spent on chronic and preventable diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma.
Without a greater emphasis on "promoting wellness and not just treating sickness," she said, today's young people may be the first with shorter life spans than their parents.
"If there is one thing that defines what it means to be American, it's that we always do better for our kids," she said. "We sacrifice so we can give them opportunities and advantages that we never had."
Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com
