Season to Share: Doctors Care provides health care for the underserved

Sheri Powers doesn’t want to slide backward.

For the first time in years, the 54-year-old has a stable living situation, a job and a vehicle. After years of homelessness, she credits Doctors Care with giving her the skills and support to better navigate life.

Powers started coming to Doctors Care for counseling sessions in January after mold in her apartment stressed her out. The situation threatened to destabilize Powers, who has severe depression and experiences manic episodes. But her work with the Littleton nonprofit’s counseling staff gave her the skills to handle the apartment problems — and much more.

Just knowing she has an appointment on the schedule gives her peace, she said. She knows she will have an opportunity to be seen and heard.

“It lets me know that there are people who care,” Powers said. “I need that.”

Powers is one of the thousands of people Doctors Care helps every year as part of its mission to provide medical care and education to those who might slip through the cracks of today’s complex and expensive health care system. Along with medical and mental health care for uninsured and underinsured, the nonprofit educates clients on insurance options and helps them enroll in programs like Medicaid and the state’s insurance marketplace, Connect for Health Colorado. Those without insurance can pay for care on a sliding-fee scale.

Everyone is frustrated with the healthcare system, said CEO Bebe Kleinman. Costs are rising, insurance is getting more complicated and care is harder to find.

“You keep hoping year after year that it’s going to get better, but it hasn’t,” said Kleinman, who has led Doctors Care for 27 years.

Recent changes to Medicaid and healthcare policy further complicate the landscape. It’s difficult for professionals to keep on top of constantly shifting policies but nearly impossible for many of Doctors Care clients, like the parents working three jobs or immigrants who speak little English. People are losing insurance coverage even if they qualify because they can’t keep up with changes to documentation or simply feel overwhelmed by the system as a whole.

“There are policies on top of policies affecting these communities,” said Laura-Elena Porras, the nonprofit’s health policy and coverage program director.

Dr. Gary VanderArk and 129 other doctors with the Arapahoe Medical Society founded the organization in 1988 to provide care for people without insurance. The doctors reasoned that if they each took on a few patients, they could make a significant difference. In 1993, Doctors Care opened its first brick-and-mortar clinic, which provided pediatric care.

In the following decades, the organization hired staff and now runs a small medical facility tucked into a Littleton office building complete with visit rooms, a vaccine fridge and a lab to process tests. Volunteers remain critical to the organization, Kleinman said, but staff are able to provide stable, consistent care to patients.

The nonprofit has repeatedly expanded the criteria for who they can serve. The nonprofit now sees people up to age 64 because they saw a lack of care options for people over 55. They also began accepting private insurance provided through the state marketplace because few other providers accepted the more limited plans.

Providing quality preventative and specialty care is not only good for patients, but for the community as a whole, Kleinman said. When people don’t have access to health care, costs multiply and shift to the medical system down the road. What could be a routine appointment becomes an emergency visit. A preventative skin cancer screening can stop a diagnosis and the need for more expensive treatment later.

Along with care for the physical body, Doctors Care provides mental health services, diapers, books and $50 King Soopers gift cards for those who need them. People need to be able to eat and meet other basic needs so they can have the capacity to think about their health, Kleinman said.