28 Bloomington Health Center (formerly Volunteers in Medicine, or VIM)

We live in a country in which not everyone has access to health insurance.  With the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), insurance has become more accessible to individuals and families, but there are still those without insurance.

Volunteers in Medicine (VIM) of Monroe County (now Bloomington Health Center, a division of Healthnet) was originially established to help uninsured, low income individuals in Monroe and Owen counties gain access to medical care.  In the original VIM model, doctors in the community volunteered to see patients who met VIM’s enrollment criteria without charge .  A common criteria for enrollment in VIM and other social services is family income.  Federal poverty level (FPL) guidelines are published annually in the spring, and set a “cutoff” for poverty for different family sizes.  Many aid programs use a multiple of the federal poverty level guidelines for enrollment in their programs; VIM originally set enrollment at 200% of FPL guidelines.

Several years ago, VIM changed its model when it became a qualified health center under the umbrella of HealthNet.  As a result, VIM now provides direct care for low-income, uninsured individuals.

The IU School of Optometry has been a proud partner with VIM for many years now, and we are referred approximately 300 of their patients a year for high quality eye care.  With the advent of the ACA these numbers have gone down some as patients are better able to afford insurance, but we still see a considerable number of VIM patients each year.