Working Off Your Health Bill

You're sick and need to see the doctor, but you don’t have insurance and you don’t have the money to pay out of pocket. It’s a familiar scene at the core of health care reform legislation winding its way through Congress. But while legislators try to agree on a solution, NPR reports one clinic in Indiana has come up with its own fix.

Under their More Than Money program, the Maple City Health Care Center in Goshen, Indiana allows patients who can’t pay for health care to work it off. But it’s not a case of getting behind the sink and washing dishes for a restaurant bill you can’t pay. Maple City credits $10 an hour towards patients’ health bills when they volunteer at another non-profit.

The health center says this taps into a resource that these patients do have: time. Many of Maple City’s patients are unemployed. They may not have money but they do have the time to put toward doing work like stacking apples at the local co-op, one of the work options open to them.

And while we wait for a national solution, small clinics like these will continue to find answers on their own.

Photo courtesy Brittany G via Flickr.