Uncompensated Costs and Indigent Health Care: Volunteers and a Community Services Budget

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Abstract
With thirty-seven million people now without medical insurance, private insurers have argued that caring for those unable to pay for the services they need or without insurance is a public responsibility and not an overhead cost. However, tax-conscious voters have limited the ability of governments to spend more for health. An additional and sometimes overlooked possibility for dealing with uncompensated care is the responses that local communities can make. A community services budget framework that includes the inputs of volunteers makes large-scale and sophisticated responses possible through forms of collective organization outside the usual public programs. This framework, applied to one community, illustrates the responses that are possible and the policy questions that must be addressed to expand the options for dealing with the challenge of uncompensated medical care.
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