A look at what healthcare reform really means--the good, the bad, the uncertain

In New Health Care Era, Blessings and Hurdles

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In a plain brown health clinic on a busy boulevard here, the growing pains of the Affordable Care Act are already being felt — almost too sharply for the harried staff trying to keep up with the flow of patients.

Tamekia Toure, 40, is typical of the clinic’s new patients, a single mother and recent arrival from Alabama with diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic pain and, for much of her adult life, no health insurance. For her, the new law is a godsend, providing Medicaid coverage that she would not have received before.

Then there is Donna Morse, 61, a widowed dental hygienist and yoga buff who is long overdue for a mammogram and blood work. She lost her insurance last year because it did not meet the new law’s standards. Now she has a new plan with much higher premiums, and which few doctors and hospitals will accept. So she too, warily, has landed at the clinic, one of seven here called Family Health Centers.

David Elson, 60, who has been coming to Family Health Centers for several years now, is a self-employed businessman with a multitude of health problems and medical bills. Despite chronic ailments, he went without insurance for years before enrolling in a subsidized private plan. He has not paid the first month’s premium, and could well fall back into the ranks of the uninsured.

“If you don’t have it, you don’t have it,” he said of the money he owed his new insurer.