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MayView Community Health Center, Mountain View’s local safety net clinic, is getting a big infusion of cash this year to serve a growing number of low-income and uninsured patients in need of affordable health care services despite a robust local economy.
Last month, the El Camino Healthcare District signed off on a package of grants to fund nonprofits and public agencies, including a $1.7 million grant to MayView — the largest provided through the program to date. The grant will pay for doctors, nurses and clinic staff needed to support an increasing number of patients in need of affordable health care.
MayView has partnered with El Camino ever since the hospital closed down the Mountain View RotaCare Clinic in 2016, designating MayView as the critical health care service provider for more than 9,000 primarily low-income patients, with the largest number coming from Mountain View. Many of MayView’s patients have difficulty accessing health care services due to lack of English proficiency, undocumented immigration status, disabilities or homelessness.
MayView received just over $1 million from the health care district last year, but the 2019-20 grants call for an extra $700,000 to hire more people and defray the high cost of serving patients regardless of ability to pay.
Most of that money will go toward hiring an additional part-time medical team at the Mountain View clinic, located on Miramonte Avenue near El Camino Real, along with subsidizing the cost of serving uninsured patients, said Ashley Peil, MayView’s director of finance. Part of the challenge, she said, is that a growing number of patients are earning a wage that is above the maximum to qualify for Medi-Cal, but not nearly enough to pay for commercial or employer-sponsored insurance.
Adults making up to 138% of the federal poverty level qualify for Medi-Cal, which is a low threshold for the Bay Area. An estimated 47,448 people make below 200% of the poverty line — up to $51,500 for a family of four — in MayView’s “service area,” which includes North County cities as well as Cupertino and Sunnyvale.
The profile of a patient visiting a local safety net clinic like MayView is evolving, Peil said, with a growing number of uninsured patients and working poor. Despite assumptions about who relies on MayView’s services, often times it’s people with full-time jobs struggling to get by, she said.
“One patient recently just had their rent increased on their RV parked in the city of Mountain View and can no longer afford the employer-sponsored insurance,” she said.
Appointments at MayView typically include what one might expect from a routine visit to a primary care doctor with an added emphasis on preventive care, said Charlene Gliniecki, human resources director. A trip to MayView might include routine physical exams, counseling on nutrition and exercise and managing chronic illnesses like hypertension and diabetes. The clinic also provides cancer screenings for early detection.
More patients are showing up in Mountain View, which is the largest of MayView’s three clinics, so it seemed like a natural fit for the grant funding, Gliniecki said.
“In Mountain View we have the demand and we have the capacity, so the additional resources will help us completely fill the available spots we have,” she said. “We need to have exam rooms and places for everyone to be.”
The original plan in May was for El Camino Healthcare District to provide a $1.2 million grant to MayView, but the district’s advisory council that comes up with the funding plan met via teleconference on June 3 and unanimously voted to bump up the funding by an extra $500,000.
The decision was based on the fact that MayView is the “essential safety net” for primary care within the district’s boundaries, according to a district staff report. Add in that the clinic is seeing more uninsured patients and undergoing complex changes in the health care reimbursement structure, and it made sense to increase the funding agreement by a large margin this year.
The news of the bigger grant is the latest step in a year of resounding recovery and improvements at MayView, which had previously been in financial trouble and risked having to close its Sunnyvale clinic. In April 2018, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors approved $375,000 in “emergency stabilization funding” to pay for new hires and keep the doors open. MayView’s employee count was reportedly dropping so quickly that it expected to lose half of its medical staff in five months.
A totally revamped board of directors, a new CEO, better salaries and some significant renovations later, and MayView has not only stabilized but is growing faster than ever.
Peil said the goal is to increase both access to and quality of health care services at MayView, and that the grant funding and the staff who recommended the $1.7 million deserve credit for improving the nonprofit.
“They really stepped up to support MayView,” she said.
El Camino Healthcare District is a public agency that collections millions of dollars in property tax revenue each year from district residents. While the original purpose was to fund the construction of El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, most of the tax money today is used to provide grants for health care initiatives and community health programs. This year, the district is distributing 54 grants and sponsorships totaling $7.8 million.
