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I'm Krista Postai, I'm CEO of the Community Health Center of Southeast
Kansas. We're based out of Pittsburg Kansas. Well, several things have
happened as a result of ARRA. It significantly has changed our lives. First,
we had the the worst ninety days of our existence right before the funding
was announced. We'd gone from twenty-five percent uninsured to forty-five
percent virtually overnight and obviously finances were incredibly stressed.
So the fact that we got additional funding to help the uninsured was like
manna from heaven. It truly was a blessing. And when the funding arrived
we were able to do significant things. We were able to take our one family
physician who was personally delivering a hundred and ten babies herself and
recruit two more family physicians to help her. Overnight her life changed and
I think we'll be able to retain her now for a while. Additionally, the capital
money has allowed us to take a building that was only two years old and already
twenty-five percent over capacity and convert it into five additional exam rooms.
This has allowed us to increase our capacity in one year from seventeen thousand
patients to twenty-three thousand patients, and from sixty-one thousand encounters
to more than seventy-one thousand encounters. And they're still coming. They are
still coming. So this is the beginning of a flow of patients I don't believe will
ever end. But that's okay because we were so relieved when we got word that ARRA
funding was coming and that it was targeted specifically for these projects. It
was like HRSA reached down and pulled us out of a hole, brushed us off, and said
"go forward."