Free Health Clinic Makes Plea for County Support

Health Connections, Inc. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

When City on a Hill abruptly closed in March, Milwaukee lost a longstanding free and charitable health clinic and patients lost their access to health care.

Some patients learned the clinic was closed when they arrived at 224 W. Kilbourn Ave. for an appointment, only to be greeted by locked doors. Health Connections Inc., a Glendale-based free and charitable clinic, stepped in to fill the void, sending staff and posting fliers to the shuttered clinic.

Since then, Health Connections has taken on approximately 500 new patients, according to Ericka Sinclair, president of Health Connections. Sinclair is now asking the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors for $400,000 in the upcoming 2027 budget. At the board’s annual public budget meeting, alongside clinic staff and patients, Sinclair appealed directly to supervisors Monday night. The clinic does not currently receive funding from the county, but it has received grants from the county Department of Health and Human Services in the past.

Sinclair’s plea for support reflects the challenges facing free and charitable clinics as more and more people lose access to health insurance. Health Connections primarily serves uninsured patients who fall in the financial gray area of making too much money for Medicaid and not enough to afford private health insurance.

Nationally, the rate of uninsured adults ages 18 to 64 has risen from 8.9% to 11.2% between 2024 and 2026, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based health care research foundation.

Federally subsidized health insurance premiums shot up in Milwaukee and across Wisconsin after the expiration of the federal enhanced premium tax credits, and fewer Wisconsinites enrolled in health insurance plans through the marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act. The tax credits were not extended by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2025. A bill extending the tax credits, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, was voted down in the Senate.

New federal reporting and work requirements for Medicaid enrollees will take effect in 2027. Increases in out-of-pocket costs for enrollees will begin the following year. Both changes were part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2025, cutting an estimated $911 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services estimated the bill would leave approximately 250,000 Wisconsinites at risk of losing their health insurance.

In the latest state biennial budget, grant funding for free and charitable clinics like Health Connections was increased by a total of $1 million annually. Funding for clinic grants increased from $2.25 million to $3.25 million.

Federal tax records show Health Connections operates on a little more than $1 million in revenue annually. Earlier this year, as previous state grant funding was drawing down, the clinic applied for but did not receive a $250,000 grant from the state. At the same time, it started taking on patients from City on a Hill. Now Sinclair and her staff are looking to the start of next year with foreboding, anticipating a spike in uninsured patients looking for care.

“It’s like a perfect storm,” she said.

Health Connections, like other clinics in Milwaukee, isn’t only a place patients go for care. It also frequently makes referrals to other clinics, sending patients to clinics that specialize in dentistry or mental health services. It doesn’t receive funding for this coordinating work, but it does it anyway, Sinclair said.

“There’s no centralized place to really do this. If a clinic closes, whose responsibility is it to help transition those patients?,” Sinclair said.

State Rep. Margaret Arney, a Democrat representing Assembly District 18 in Milwaukee, attended the county board’s meeting to support funding for the clinic.

“I met them in the crisis that followed the abrupt closing of City on a Hill Free Clinic,” Arney said. “When their clinic closed — padlocks on the doors — the people who met them at those locked doors [was] Health Connections Inc.”

Patients, too, joined Health Connections at the county board meeting Monday. Dezjorn Gauthier, a Black transgender man and officer with the Wisconsin State Fair Park police, told supervisors that Health Connections has built up a huge reservoir of trust in the transgender community.

“It is one of the few doors in this county where Black trans people do not have to explain their existence before they can explain their symptoms,” Gauthier said. 

Whether Milwaukee County provides the funding will be up to county supervisors. The 2027 budget has required policymakers to close a projected $50.8 million budget gap, a product of a structural deficit caused by a lucrative pension plan enacted 20 years ago and frozen state aid for more than two decades. The county budget is ruled by the need for austerity, with property tax increases and cuts to public services used to close the gap.

The county board’s Committee on Finance adopted a sweeping amendment ahead of the annual meeting that managed to scrape together funding for a handful of community programs and also reduce the increase to the property tax rate in 2027. If the board provides funding for the clinic, it will have to pull funding from another program or raise the property tax rate.

Sinclair said her organization is also reaching out to nonprofits and other governmental institutions for support. Without funding, the clinic will start “hitting some walls” in 2028, she said.

“But I also want to flip it and say it would speak volumes if they did support us in this way,” Sinclair said. “It would acknowledge what we have been doing unfunded, so far, and it would solidify what I believe really is the true part of Milwaukee, which is that we are partners, true partners, in ways where we do take care of each other.”