A new report by the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative finds that hundreds of thousands of patients could lose access to comprehensive primary and preventive care at community health centers if a proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is adopted. Applying prior research into the chilling effect and its spillover impact to the proposed new public charge rule, Collaborative researchers determined that the rule’s chilling effect could cause between 354,000 and 646,000 community health center patients to forgo Medicaid coverage, and between 295,000 and 538,000 patients could lose access to primary care.
The report was authored by Leighton Ku, Jessica Sharac, Rachel Gunsalus, Peter Shin and Sara Rosenbaum.