To all our sliding fee and self-pay patients:

All medical and mental health department visit and procedure fees have been updated to reflect the actual costs of providing high-quality primary health care services to our patient population. These fee increases are effective Monday July 9, 2007. Our costs continue to rise – which is part of the reason for these increases – but more importantly, the health center must ensure that it remains financially viable so that it can continue to serve the needs of all of its patients for the short- and long-term. BCHF’s current financial issues make it necessary to implement these fee increases immediately, and while many of the increases are significant, the new fees still reflect our commitment to keeping health care affordable for everyone.

This is how the new fee schedules will affect you, our patient:

• Instead of charging a flat fee for visits, a sliding fee discount, based on each patient’s family income and size and ranging from 30% to 70%, will be applied to the visit charge.

• All procedures – surgical procedures, in-house labs, x-rays, injections, supplies and the like – will be charged at cost.

• All outside labs that are sent to LabCorp will be billed directly from LabCorp and will be the responsibility of the patient. We recognize how much more expensive this can be, so we are looking at increasing the range of labs that can be performed in-house to keep lab costs reasonable for you.

We will continue to ask you to pay your co-pays and your portion of all charges at the time of your visit. Furthermore we ask that you pay your outstanding balances from previous visits. Our front-desk staff is available to help you with the latter.

We thank you for your understanding and cooperation while we implement these necessary changes, and we welcome your questions and feedback.