Oh look...healthcare services for 30 million people are at risk thanks to the House GOP's internal squabbling.

The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) was first established in 1965 but also had its annual budget nearly doubled thanks to a provision in the Affordable Care Act:

Since the nation’s first health Community Health Centers opened in 1965, expansion of the federally supported health center system to over 1,400 organizations has created an affordable health care option for more than 30 million people. Health centers in every state, U.S. territory, and the District of Columbia, provide care to patients, regardless of ability to pay.

Health centers help increase access to crucial primary care by reducing barriers such as cost, lack of insurance, distance, and language for their patients. In doing so, health centers — also called Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) — provide substantial benefits to the country and its health care system.

Health centers have their roots in the Civil Rights Movement. The visionary community activists and reform-minded physicians who founded the earliest health centers believed that we could fight poverty and empower communities with health and opportunity. Today health equity remains a top priority for our country.

Health centers improve the health and well-being of underserved communities while empowering people to become actively involved in solving issues unique to their needs and communities.

Health centers are innovators, healers and problem solvers that reach beyond the walls of the conventional health care delivery system to prevent illness and address the social drivers that may cause poor health – diet, nutrition, mental illness, or homelessness.

The health center mission to promote health equity has become increasingly important in the fight against COVID-19 and other preventable diseases.

Health centers have been vital in protecting marginalized communities from COVID-19 —including communities of color and special populations .

As I've noted several times over the years, CHC funds, whch have to be renewed occasionally, have been repeatedly put at risk over the past decade or so. For instance, from 2018...

Congress has finally hauled the health insurance program for low-income kids to dry land, but community health centers are still out at sea.

After an unprecedented 114-day funding lapse, lawmakers voted yesterday to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program for another six years as part of the spending bill to reopen the government. But while we certainly applaud lawmakers for meeting their CHIP deadline a mere four months after the fact, let’s not forget that Congress has only really done half the job here.

Funding for the nation’s community health centers, which serve one out of every dozen Americans, also technically expired Sept. 30. These centers, which provide a range of services to the low-income population, would lose $3.6 billion this year without renewal by Congress.

It was definitely a surprise that lawmakers allowed the bipartisan CHIP program to go so long without renewal — especially because Democrats and Republicans both typically praise the program and have repeatedly voted overwhelmingly to fund it. But it’s even more shocking to some health-care advocates that Congress has permitted community health center funding to lapse this long.

Unfortunately, it's deja vu all over again today, as reported by Bridget Early at Inside Health Policy:

The National Association of Community Health Centers is calling on lawmakers to act quickly to reauthorize community health center funding as future movement on the joint House health care package is unclear after a House vote was abruptly canceled Monday (Sept. 18) night. The Senate health committee will mark up its own bill Thursday, funded in part with pharmacy benefit manager reforms.

The health center lobby is also urging lawmakers to factor funding for CHCs, the National Health Service Corps and Teaching Health Center graduate medical education (THCGME) into any continuing resolution bill moving forward.

"It's crucially important that health centers get included in whatever [continuing resolution] gets passed,” said Joe Dunn, NACHC’s senior vice president of public policy and research. “We just cannot afford not to have continued funding for any period of time.”

...Community health center funding has topped lawmakers’ to-do list since early spring, though forward momentum hasn’t come without snags. With the clock ticking down to the end of the fiscal year, several packages that include funding reauthorization for community health centers are circulating.

...A [House] vote on the legislation was slated for Monday evening, but was canceled late in the afternoon.