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Through program, Cedar Rapids clinic has provided $8.2M worth of free medications
Feb. 16, 2025 5:30 am
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CEDAR RAPIDS — Eric Bee immigrated to Cedar Rapids in 2017, hoping to earn money he could use to support his family back in Liberia. But less than two months after he got here, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“I had no insurance, nothing. I didn’t have money,” said Bee, who came here through the diversity immigrant visa program. “I didn’t know my way out.”
Luckily, Bee connected with the Community Health Free Clinic in Cedar Rapids, which provides free medical care to people who are uninsured or underinsured. The clinic helped pay for surgery at University of Iowa Health Care that successfully removed the tumor.
Bee’s doctors gave him a list of medications he needed to take after the surgery — but since he didn’t have insurance, he ignored the prescriptions. But soon he was back in the clinic, complaining of several painful symptoms from the recovery.
That’s when he learned the clinic also provides medication free of charge. He was able to get the prescriptions he needed. Since then, he’s been visiting the clinic, at 947 14th Ave. SE in Cedar Rapids, regularly for medical care and medications that are part of his ongoing recovery.
“Sometime I think, just when I sit by myself and try to retrospect, what if I couldn’t have seen this clinic? What could happen to me next? My family could lose me. They had the hope that, ‘Oh, our son, our uncle, our dad, he went to the U.S. He saw opportunities, he was going to be working, supporting us,’ and then all of a sudden to say ‘He died,” Bee said. “I’m just grateful. I don’t even know what to say.”
Bee is one of thousands of people around Iowa who receive free or discounted medication through a statewide nonprofit called SafeNetRx that partners with the Cedar Rapids clinic and other clinics across the state. According to Jon Rosmann, chief executive officer of SafeNetRx, the program has benefited 154,000 patients in Iowa since it started over 20 years ago.
“The need for assistance has just become greater and greater. In the last couple years, the request for prescription assistance has doubled. There are just a lot of a lot of Iowans, and a lot of Americans, period, that need help accessing medicine,” he said.
“I think the biggest increase has been in underinsured patients. We’ve always known there’s a pretty significant uninsured population in Iowa, and in the U.S. in general, but there’s a really growing underinsured population, where patients technically have health insurance, but the out-of-pocket expense or the deductible before any prescription assistance kicks in is so great that patients never reach that point.”
The repository works by accepting donated medicines from medical facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies. Often medications from these places goes unused after someone dies or stops taking a certain medication before finishing the full amount initially prescribed. If that medication is in tamper-evident sealed packaging and more than six months from expiring, it can be donated to the repository. SafeNetRx then distributes it to one of the 244 health care facilities around the state that then prescribes it.
SafeNetRx contracts with the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services to operate the drug repository for the entire state.
It got started in 2001 as a Medicare prescription drug program to help make medication more accessible for people on the program. After Medicare Part D was passed to take effect in 2006 — lowering prescription drug prices for Medicare participants — SafeNetRx shifted to become a program that helps provide medication for all vulnerable, medically underserved patients, according to Rosmann.
The Community Health Free Clinic has been working with SafeNetRx since it first started, and started keeping data about the medication it distributes in 2013. Since then, the clinic has filled, for free, over 45,000 prescriptions for more than 31,000 patients, with the help of SafeNetRx. At retail price, that’s $8.2 million worth of medicine.
“We’re very tight with our money, and we’re very tight with staff, and we utilize as many volunteers as we can so that donor money can always go to patient care,” said Darlene Schmidt, the CEO of Community Free Health Clinic.
Without the help of SafeNetRx to address patients who can’t afford their medications, “we would have to be very aggressive with fundraising. We utilize every grant that there is. I don’t think there’s any more grants that we could go after.”
What medications are available through SafeNetRx varies, depending on what has been donated and what other distribution centers across the state are asking for. Anything that isn’t available through the repository has to be bought by the clinic, or the clinic helps its patients pay for it elsewhere.
“One of the medications that we get some of, not very much, is called Xarelto,” a brand of blood thinner intended to reduce blood clots and stroke risk. “…If our patients were going to buy a 30-day supply of that over the counter, it’s over $500, just for 30 days. So, we can order that, but unfortunately, we might only get enough for one patient,” said Fran Struck, the clinic’s dental health coordinator who handles the reception and sorting of the medications that come through SafeNetRx. “It depends what they have in stock, since it’s such an expensive drug, and we’re not the only people that order from them.”
Receiving the donated medications is a long process. Medications that come in pill form are delivered in pill sheets in sealed packages, meaning that after Struck reviews and sorts them, they have to be popped out of the sheets one pill at a time and placed in bottles to be distributed to patients. The clinic is able to rely mostly on volunteers for that part of the process.
Mary Fredericksen, another patient who has received medication through the program, said she is grateful for all the efforts.
“I would not hesitate to sing the praises of the wonderful, wonderful work that they do here, and they’ve saved many, many, many more lives than just mine,” Fredericksen said.
Fredericksen has been a patient with the clinic since 2020, when she had a heart issue that caused her to need quadruple bypass surgery at the UI hospital. She is a widow and supports her disabled adult son. So when she was told she wouldn’t be able to work for quite some time after the surgery, she said she didn’t know how she was going to live — let alone afford medication. But a friend from church who works at the clinic recommended she visit.
“So, I came over here and met some of the staff, and they have been like angels. They will hop right to it to help you,” Fredericksen said. “I wouldn’t be alive today if these people hadn’t stepped in and helped me. And I know I’m getting to the end of my road, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, have made it this far, seriously, without their help.”
Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com
Public Safety Reporter, The Gazette
I cover breaking news and trends related to public safety for The Gazette.
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