Health centers are a key element of community infrastructure, especially in low-income communities. They ensure the vibrancy of communities across the country by investing in human capital, generating economic activity, and spurring secondary spending.

Primary and preventive healthcare is a vital ingredient for ensuring individual social and economic opportunity. It is essential if adults are to participate in the workforce and children are to succeed in school. In its absence, illnesses that could be prevented or managed can become life threatening, leading to lost time and productivity, family financial devastation, dependence, disability, and even premature death. Lack of a regular source of primary care forces low-income populations to rely on the most expensive elements of the healthcare system: emergency rooms and inpatient hospital care. The National Association of Community Health Centers estimates, for example, that $18 billion a year is wasted on avoidable emergency room visits.
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The development of health centers improves real property, generates construction jobs, and produces permanent community assets. It also creates new, varied, stable, and well-paying employment opportunities. Health centers hire locally because they value those with knowledge of the community, the culture, and the language of area residents. The healthcare industry offers higher wages than other areas of the private sector, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Moreover, healthcare provides well-defined career ladders, including jobs for lower-skilled clerical, security, and maintenance workers and people entering the field with little or no specialized education or training.

A healthcare center operated by the Hudson Head-waters Health Network in Warrensburg, New York, a rural community one hour north of Albany, provides an example of the economic impact of community health centers. In its analysis of the center, the New York State Office of the State Comptroller concluded, “Affordable and accessible healthcare services are primary components of a region’s economic vitality. …Without a local healthcare system, communities may find it difficult to bring in new residents and retain new businesses and the jobs they represent.” To estimate economic impact, the study used rec-ognized health industry multipliers that each health center job indirectly creates 1.06 additional jobs in the region and that payroll and nonpayroll spend-ing circulates 1.55 times through the local economy.

This is an excerpt from The NEXT American Opportunity. The full text can be downloaded as an Adobe PDF Document.