$16.8-Million to Help Poor Get Health Care

In an effort to help the rising number of Americans who lack health insurance, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is spending $16.8-million to help cities design new ways to finance and deliver health-care services to the poor.

In the first phase of the program, called Communities in Charge: Financing and Delivering Health Care to the Uninsured, 20 cities have received one-year grants of up to $150,000 to study the scope of the problem and to bring together health-care providers and leaders from various other fields to review potential solutions.

In the second phase, as many as 15 of the cities will receive three-year grants of up to $700,000 to design a new system to provide health care to the uninsured.

The objectives of the program are to bring down the number of uninsured Americans — currently 44 million — and to provide a cost-efficient way to care for uninsured patients, foundation officials said.

Communities in Charge is administered by the consulting company Medimetrix. For more information, contact Medimetrix, 1500 North Point Tower, 1001 Lakeside Avenue, Cleveland 44114; (216) 736-7940; http://www.communitiesincharge.org.