Shovel-Ready Clinics

Barack Obama has spent most of his first term as president wrestling with three enormous tasks: kick-starting the economy to create jobs again; standing the banking sector back on its feet; and providing health care to the 40 million Americans who lack insurance. He’s made progress on all these fronts.

But let’s be honest. Despite billions in federal stimulus money, the American jobs machine is barely functioning, and millions of previously hardworking Americans, especially in construction and the “trades,” are sitting idle. Despite billions in bailouts, America’s banks are barely lending, especially to small businesses. And while Obama did pass health care reform, those very reforms actually threaten to overwhelm an already severely strained primary health care infrastructure with a huge wall of new “customers” demanding health care services...

...Part of the solution is relatively uncontroversial. As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years...