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- Craig LeMoult reports on how community health centers, which provide services to low-income patients, are facing potential closure due to lack of funding.
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Community health centers — which provide vital medical services for the majority of low-income patients in Massachusetts — are facing a range of financial threats due to federal policy changes that will likely force them to scale back operations.
The first modern community health center in the country was founded 60 years ago in Dorchester. Since then, some 17,000 sites have opened across the country. In Massachusetts, there are 50 centers that offer general practice medicine and social services to about a million patients a year. According to the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, 43% of those patients are covered by Medicaid and another 15% are uninsured.
Traditionally, these centers have been politically popular and enjoyed bipartisan support, said John McDonough, professor of practice at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. But that’s changed in the second Trump administration.
“We are seeing the greatest assault on community health centers and healthcare for disadvantaged populations that we have ever seen in the modern history of the country, going back to the 1960s when we created Medicare and Medicaid,” McDonough said. “They’re going to be hit from so many different directions. They are going to have to cut back on their staffs. They may have to close programs. Some of them, I believe, will probably go out of business.”
That “assault” includes proposed changes to a pharmaceutical discount program, cuts to insurance subsidies and Medicaid, and other federal changes. Leaders of these centers say that taken together, all those changes undermine their already precarious finances.
“At this moment, we should be celebrating community health centers. And instead, many policies are being either undermined or put into place that jeopardize their ongoing existence,” said Carlene Pavlos, executive director of the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance. “It’s a travesty.”
Here are several of the key changes the leaders of community health centers say are posing a threat to their financial health in 2026.
Read the full article about community health centers by Craig LeMoult at GBH News.