CLINICS PROVIDE CARE TO UNINSURED AND WORKING POOR

One of the most common complaints of medical care in this country is the system's inefficiency in treating uninsured patients.

Most family doctors have little room for additional patients. Those who can take more are hesitant to accept the uninsured. As a result, those people too often end up in emergency rooms when illnesses or injuries occur.

But emergency-room care is expensive. Such last-resort medical attention only drives up medical costs for everyone.

In the Cape Girardeau area, though, primary-care physicians -- through the Cross Trails Medical Centers in Cape Girardeau, Bollinger and Stoddard counties -- will step into the gap too often filled by emergency rooms.

Cross Trails is the brainchild of the three counties' health departments. The health department administrators two years ago set out to assess the problem of people with relatively minor ailments acquiring family doctors only through emergency rooms.

The health officials decided these people -- along with Medicaid and Medicare recipients, the working poor and the underinsured -- needed primary-care physicians. Thus the establishment of the not-for-profit clinics, funded by about $400,000 in grants.

Eventually Cross Trails clinics are to become relatively self-supporting, with Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, sliding fee scales and private insurance.

Cross Trails is a good example of local public health officials' identifying a local need and then working to meet that need.