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A Quarter Century Of Free Health Care At People's Health Clinic Is Just The Start

Though the dream of free, quality health care is unlikely to ever become reality on a national scale in the U.S., it's already so for uninsured residents of Summit and Wasatch Counties. 

Over the past 25 years, the People's Health Clinic has brought the best in health care to individuals who make up the backbone of the Wasatch Back. All it takes is proof of uninsured status and proof of residency to be seen by their team of highly trained medical personnel.

"We don't actually look at what people's income levels are," said Mairi Leining, the clinic's chief executive officer. "That being said, I mean, wealthy people don't go to a free clinic, so 98% of our patients live below the federal poverty level."

This has been the case since its founding in 1999, created in response to a problem that still exists today.

John Hanrahan, a doctor and one of the nonprofit's founders, said a local family doctor was seeing a lot of Latino patients who didn't have health care.

"So he went to Father Bob Bussen at St. Mary's Catholic Church to say, 'Hey, I've seen a lot of your parishioners who don't have health insurance. Is there something that can be done about that to help them?'" Hanrahan said.

They decided to see if access to free health care would be received by the community and held a health fair at Park City High School to check blood pressure and glucose.

"We had about 700 people show up, which was a massive number for that sort of event," Hanrahan said. "So that kind of convinced everybody that, yeah, there really was a real need and a big need, and we should move ahead."

First, they bought a mobile trailer, which had one exam room and one entry room where they could draw blood.

Dalia Gonzalez, at the time a 9-year-old undocumented Park City resident, remembered stepping onto that trailer in its early days. Though her younger siblings were born in the United States after her parents moved from Mexico when she was an infant and had access to health care growing up, she didn't have that same luxury.

"At the time, we were undocumented, so therefore my parents didn't have any health insurance. And my parents would take me for my pediatric checkups, and if I was sick, they would take me to the People's Health Clinic, and I would get my care there," Gonzalez said.

The People's Health Clinic was just one of the resources resulting from a generous Park City community, said Gonzalez, who remembered also receiving the opportunity to ski, thanks to a local nonprofit. 

"For me it was always like, 'Wow, I live in such a giving community. I want one day to be able to give back,'" she said.

In high school, Gonzalez began volunteering at the clinic and pursued a path in the medical field. After graduating from the University of Utah, she got a job with Planned Parenthood in Park City.

"The service that they provided in Park City was access to birth control, access to women's health care. And unfortunately, Planned Parenthood had to leave the Park City community because I remember that the lease went too high," she said. "That's when People's Health Clinic took the plan of, 'OK, if our partner can't stay, we need to do something to be able to provide this service.'"

Gonzalez has come full circle, now working as the operations director at the People's Health Clinic, supporting the medical staff behind the scenes, ensuring they're fully staffed with the right equipment they need each day. 

Since Gonzalez' and many others' experience with the clinic 25 years ago, plenty has changed.

"It's grown from being an urgent care-type clinic to make sure people are getting any basic health care, to being actually a really comprehensive, multidisciplinary health-care center that offers really, really good health care," said Leining.

They started out open two evenings a week on a four-person team, purely as volunteers, said Hanrahan, who for years was the primary physician for the clinic. After a while, they realized they needed some paid health providers to ensure continuity of care.

Now, they have three full-time advanced-practice providers, a once-a-week OB GYN and a large network of volunteer specialists for cardiology, endocrinology and rheumatology, as well as high-level mental health providers, said Leining. Almost everyone at the clinic is fluent in Spanish, as 90% of the clinic's patients prefer Spanish.

"A lot of them retired in Park City but weren't really ready to leave medicine, and then a few are still actually in active practice but take a day a month to come and make sure that our patients have that specialty level of care," Leining said.

"We really just have the best of providers because generally assholes don't want to come work in a free clinic where you get paid a whole lot less," she added with a laugh.

With the expanded staff, they've been able to care for more and more individuals each year. According to their 2023 annual report, the clinic had 13,110 patient encounters treating 3,018 individual residents.  

"The trust in the clinic from our patients has grown," said Hanrahan. "I think it took a couple of years for our patient demographic, which is mostly Latino, to really feel like, 'Yeah, they want to help us, and we're welcome here.'"

Most of their patients are undocumented workers who are uninsurable through state-funded insurance programs like Medicaid.

"Our patients, they've survived just insane trauma like family getting murdered, escaping extreme violence, crossing through the Darien Gap, riding the top of the trains that you've seen on the news. Our patients have really done all those things," said Leining. 

After arriving in Park City, many of these residents then face tough living conditions, such as cramming up to 10 people in one apartment, and exploitation, she said. These experiences are a big reason why the clinic added mental health care to their offerings last year, and they have had over 1,000 mental health visits since then, Leining said. 

As they have added more employees, many come with personal ties to the clinic, Leining said, whether growing up as patients like Gonzalez or having family members receive care from the clinic. 

Another part of their success comes from community partnerships and donors. Intermountain Healthcare is the clinic's biggest donor, said Leining, and they run all the clinic's laboratory studies and do radiology for free.

They also supported the clinic in finding a home in the Summit County Health Department building, which is also located on the bus routes from Wasatch County and from Park City.

"So for Summit County to be able to build a health department building on this land, Intermountain said, 'You can have the land, but you have to give space to the People's Health Clinic,'" said Leining. "We have the best rent ever. It's $1 a year for a 40-year lease."

The Wasatch Back community has also rallied behind the work of the clinic over the years.

"That's really what's made it work is the people in town and around town who agree with the mission and say, 'Yeah, folks who work in our community deserve health care, and we're going to help them get it,'" said Hanrahan.

Now, the clinic is nationally recognized. In March, they received a $1 million donation from MacKenzie Scott's Yield Giving campaign. This money will primarily be used to expand the clinic's hours, said Leining.

"We did a big patient survey last year, and it's what our patients asked for. They just said, 'Can we have evening hours? That's when I can get off of work.' So we're trying to do what they need," she said.

Starting July 1, they will stay open until 9 p.M. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. They hope the expanded time will also shorten the wait for available appointments, which currently sits around four to six weeks.

"I think we're all looking for meaningfulness and purpose in our lives, and this was a great way for me to find meaning and purpose and give back to the community and make a difference," said Hanrahan.

It also helps that they don't have to play the insurance game, he said.

"It gets you back to what is real medicine and what you really got into medicine for," said Hanrahan.

The need for a clinic like the People's Health Clinic will likely never go away, Gonzalez said.

Learn more about the clinic, either as a patient, donor or volunteer, at peopleshealthclinic.Org.

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