CPA Expands Community Health Care Initiatives,

Epstein Selected to Lead Health Care Program

In 1998, CPA’s health care program will focus on identifying and implementing community-based health care policy solutions. Nancy Epstein will join CPA to oversee health care initiatives and serve as a link between policymakers and community health care projects.

“Nancy Epstein brings with her a strong voice for a holistic, community health care approach,” said CPA President and CEO Linda Tarr-Whelan. “In the national health care debate, we need to take a step back and figure out how we build healthy communities. Without secure health care at that fundamental, community level, everyone is at risk.”

Epstein comes to CPA from the Disability Policy Consortium in Austin, Texas, where she coordinated activities of 20 statewide consumer advocacy organizations and worked with policymakers on initiatives affecting those with disabilities. She also spent five years as a health issues staffer in the Texas Senate and holds a Master’s of Public Health from the University of North Carolina.

CPA’s community health care program, supported in part by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, operates through collaboration with Georgetown University’s Harrison Institute for Public Law. One of the objectives of the joint project is to work with 20 community-based health care providers across the U.S. to find policy solutions promoting preventive, non-piecemeal, quality health care and health education to underserved communities.

These health care providers range from primary health care clinics to broader programs, such as the Virginia-based CHIP, in which community health workers and practitioners match at-risk children and families with doctors and assist families in achieving non-medical goals such as finding jobs. In 1996 CHIP, which operates 11 sites throughout Virginia, received a two-year $1.4 million grant from the state legislature to fund a community health worker program. CHIP recently expanded their service area by opening a site in northern Virginia.

As national discussion of health care reform continues and the health care market changes, many experts are looking to states for examples of successful and efficient health care programs that go beyond primary care. Innovative answers to questions on managed care, Medicaid expansion and the prohibition of drive-through deliveries (model legislation available from CPA) came first from states.

Bringing successful, innovative community health care initiatives to the attention of state legislators and other policymakers will be a key goal of CPA’s health care program in 1998.