East Providence Community Health Center

Unilocal is calling this business the East Providence Community Health Center, but they call themselves East Bay Family Health Care (EBFHC). I don’t know why they have two names. It is part of a larger charitable organization called the East Bay Community Action Program (EBCAP). Lots of names!
I am a patient at this place, and my doctor is a very good one. They provide medical services to uninsured East Bay residents on a sliding scale. However, their sliding scale is a little ridiculous. Typically, a visit with my doctor will cost $ 170 to $ 240, and they will charge me half of that. The problem is, $ 85 to $ 120 is what I would expect to pay a private doctor (even less, actually). Consequently, there are really no savings here. At this time I have an income under $ 15,000. But if my income goes up, I won’t be able to afford them any more, and then I will have to find a new doctor. (For reasons I don’t understand, medical fees are absurdly high in Rhode Island. When I moved from New York six years ago, I was shocked to discover that a typical doctor’s visit was 30% more than in New York.)
My doctor spends slightly more time with me than the private doctors I saw before, but as I said, I’m paying for it. My last visit cost me $ 118.50 because it took 30 minutes, but that isn’t cheap. I assume that my doctor is working for a salary, and that’s why she isn’t watching the clock.
Perhaps because they consider themselves to be a charitable organization, they make things difficult for their patients. In order to see your doctor, you have to call at 8:00 a.m. for an appointment — they will not schedule appointments in advance. But not everyone is able to call them at 8:00 a.m., like me. I always sleep later than that. To make matters worse, on some mornings their phone will be constantly busy, and you’ll have to call repeatedly for 30 minutes or more before you get through. The inconvenience of not being able to make an appointment ahead of time is HUGE. And yet, I pay the same fees that I would pay to a private doctor for this inconvenience. (Since writing this, they have relaxed their rule a little, and they are scheduling some appointments ahead of time — but only a limited number. Frankly, they need to be like other doctors’ offices and schedule ALL appointments in advance.)
There is one respect in which this organization is very good: They have an arrangement with a local lab to charge the patient the actual cost of lab work. That can save you a huge amount of money. In New York, a complete blood panel cost me $ 195 (six years ago); at this place, it cost me $ 25 (four years ago). A thyroid test cost $ 100 in New York (six years ago); here it cost me $ 20 (four years ago) and $ 23 (two years ago). Lab fees have become one of the new profit centers in the medical industry. Whereas years ago, lab fees were always reasonable, now they routinely charge four or five times what the test actually costs, and a typical lab can pull in millions of dollars in profits every year. On the investors’ page of the lab that my NY doctor uses, they crow about how many tens of millions of dollars they are making. It’s things like this that make me hate the medical industry.
One other good thing about EBFHC: they are very cooperative about renewing prescriptions over the phone.
So I stay with EBFHC for the low lab fees, for the slightly longer doctors’ visits, and for the doctor that I have come to like. But the fees are not as charitable as you might expect, and the inconvenience of having to wake up early is pretty enormous for people who aren’t on a day schedule.
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Update: In mid-​2015, my doctor moved her practice to Pawtucket, and I couldn’t follow her there (that made two doctors at EBFHC who abandoned me). Without a car, and with my back problem worsening, I couldn’t bike the 5.5 miles up to Riverside and back. My friend who used to drive me was getting older and couldn’t drive me any more. Consequently, I decided not to switch to another doctor at EBFHC. Even before my doctor left, I tried to get her to authorize Logisticare cabs for me, but she wouldn’t. Indeed, she left the decision up to a nurse manager, which really angered me. The nurse manager treated me as if I were a faker who wanted cabs for no good reason; he had no sympathy for my multitude of health problems (or my phobia about enclosed, crowded spaces) which made it difficult to spend 2−½ hours on buses each time I needed to see my doctor.
Since writing the review above, I went onto Medicaid under the ACA, and then I went onto Medicare. In early 2016, I found a doctor in Bristol who is easy to get to. Now that I’m on Medicare, it doesn’t matter who I go to since they all charge the Medicare-​approved fees. However, I continue to be angry at EBFHC for not taking my individual problems seriously, and for not allowing me to use a government service (Logisticare cabs) which I felt I qualified for.