United States Federally Qualified Health Center Program

A United States federal program of community-based health centers, tracing its origin to 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, with the modern Federally Qualified Health Center designation and its cost-based Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement created through the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989-1990. FQHCs provide comprehensive primary care to medically underserved populations regardless of a patient's immigration status, insurance coverage or ability to pay, functioning as a core part of the country's health safety net for low-income and minority communities. The program has grown to more than 8,000 sites nationwide employing roughly 255,000 full-time staff, serving about 30 million people a year, 28.6 million of them in centers receiving direct federal funding as of 2021, with more than 91 percent of patients living below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, 48 percent enrolled in Medicaid, 23 percent uninsured and 63 percent identifying as a racial or ethnic minority; alongside its base Medicare and Medicaid funding, the Affordable Care Act provided 11 billion dollars to the program through the Community Health Center Fund between 2011 and 2015 and the American Rescue Plan added 7.6 billion dollars in emergency COVID-19 support.