Health Care Forum Fosters Reform Dialogue

Experts on the front lines of health care in this community gathered Thursday night at the Louisville Science Center to help foster more debate and dialogue about proposed changes to the country's health care system.  Panelist William Wagner heads the city’s nonprofit health care delivery system, Family Health Centers.  He says that his agency is the primary safety net for the city’s uninsured, and it’s struggling to meet the growing need. “We have 43,000 individual patients that we see every year, so we’re taking care of about 25,000 individual patients every year who are uninsured in our clinics. And that’s out of a total number of 80,000 persons who are uninsured in Jefferson County," said Wagner. Wagner told the audience he believes the time is now for health care reform because these numbers are unsustainable.