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About Our Cause
Our 2010 Raise Your Heart for Health event will support one of our community’s greatest needs: affordable dental care.
Dental services are out of reach for most uninsured in our valley, but for the low-income, accessing needed dental care is close to impossible. They simply can’t afford the cost. We want to create a fund to help very low-income residents receive the care they need to alleviate tooth pain and help them get back on track. We are targeting low-income children and senior citizens on fixed incomes whose poor dental health is compromising their overall health.
Our goal is to raise $75,000 to support our dental health services—with your help, this goal is well within our reach.
You can help us provide these much needed services by sponsoring Raise Your Heart for Health or simply by joining us for this fun evening. One hundred percent of proceeds raised will fund critical dental services.
About Dental Care in our Community
Anyone who has ever had a toothache knows dental pain can make it impossible to work, study, or just carry on the normal activities of daily life. Oral health problems seldom get better on their own and can be both a sign, and a cause of disease elsewhere in the body.
Increasing our ability to provide more dental services is a financial imperative. In 2008, our local hospitals provided 2,765 emergency department visits for dental complaints at a cost of $1,412,915. Most of this expense is uncollectible and a misuse of resources because our hospitals are not equipped to address the source of dental infections.
Our goal is to raise $75,000 to support an emergency dental fund for uninsured and very low income community members. These are patients who do not earn enough to afford dental care even at our greatest discount level. The fund will support three categories of patients:
- Children who have no other source of care;
- Homeless adults with pain, swelling, and infection; and
- Elderly with fixed incomes who have pain, swelling, and infection or whose poor dental health is compromising their overall health (heart disease, diabetes, etc.).
Why should you support La Clinica’s Raise Your Heart for Health Event?
Supporting La Clinica is good for your business, your employees, and for our community.
- La Clinica provides essential health care services that help our community stay healthy and productive—keeping adults on the job and kids in school;
- La Clinica’s services keep people out of costly emergency departments for non-emergency issues—which saves us all money;
- La Clinica’s services focus on preventing disease by promoting immunizations, dental hygiene, exercise and nutrition, and general well-being; and
- La Clinica provides social services to reach out to the neediest—children at risk for child abuse and neglect, the homeless, and the very poor.
La Clinica serves a large portion of our community; the neediest among us.
In 2009, La Clinica provided 62,772 patient visits to 15,159 patients! The great majority of our patients are low-income and uninsured: 72 percent are very low income; 52 percent are uninsured; 35 percent are Hispanic; 37 percent are under 19 years of age; and 11 percent are homeless. Imagine if the 32,329 visits we provided to uninsured patients had occurred in our local emergency departments, this would have cost over $18 million. *
* This figure is based on a conservative cost of $560 per emergency department visit and does not take into consideration any hospitalization, medications, and other ancillary cost.
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