Suburban Primary Health Care Council

Mission :The Suburban Primary Health Care Council’s mission is to facilitate access to primary health care services to residents of suburban Cook County and northwest Chicago who lack such access because of financial barriers. It has successfully fulfilled this mission since 1988 through its Access to Care program. Over 116,000 unduplicated individuals have had a medical home because of Access to Care, many of them for several years. In the last year Access to Care served 5665 individuals.

Program structure:Patients in the Access to Care program are linked to a local primary care physician, an internist or family physician. They pay the physician $5 for each office visit. If the physician orders a diagnostic laboratory test or routine x-ray the patient pays $5 per specimen or x-ray. The patients pay $15 (generic), $30 (preferred brand), or $40 (non-preferred brand) for prescription medication written by their Access to Care physicians.

Client profile: According to the latest US census, 10.6% of Cook County population (more than 520,000) is uninsured. In addition, there are many individuals who are underinsured -those that purchased health care insurance at low premiums on the Affordable Health Care Act(ACA) health exchanges but cannot meet the corresponding high deductibles. ATC also serves immigrants who have been in the country less than five years and are thus ineligible for Medicaid or the ACA. According to the Illinois Coalition For Immigrant and Refugee Rights(ICIRR) Cook County is home to 511,000 undocumented immigrants, 41% of whom do not speak any English and nearly two-thirds have incomes below 200% of federal poverty level. Apart from emergency rooms,