This story was originally published by The Merced FOCUS.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an appearance in Atwater on Thursday, where he unveiled a new funding stream for health clinics nationwide, $102 million aimed at expanding access to primary care, including in rural communities.
Kennedy, accompanied by federal Health Resources and Services Administrator Thomas Engels, made the announcement Thursday afternoon at Castle Family Health Services in Atwater.
The announcement included news that Castle is one of dozens of clinics across the country that are being upgraded to full Federally Qualified Health Center status, which will open doors to additional grant funding that has previously been unavailable.
The grants are from the New Access Point program, which Kennedy said will support almost 160 new and existing health centers. Those, in turn, will support 415 new care clinic sites with the goal of expanding primary-care access to about 1 million people nationwide, he said.
“It’s the first major expansion of the health center program since the first Trump administration in 2019,” Kennedy told an audience of Castle Family clinic administrators and staff. Community health centers “are what the American health system should look like,” he added. “They’re the template for what we should be doing everywhere”
Primary care is a key to keeping people healthy,” Kennedy said, and “the one institution that is doing that really well in this country is community health centers.”
He added that when he visits such clinics, “I come away inspired, as I did today. A patient from the poorest family and the poorest community can walk into this health center off the street and get eye care and get dental care, get comprehensive care, and they won’t let him leave this hospital until he’s had his blood pressure tests and glucose levels and all the tests that you need to keep that person healthy over the long run.”
Of 158 center organizations receiving New Access Point grants nationwide, three are in the San Joaquin Valley: Castle Family in Atwater, Fresno-based United Health Centers of the San Joaquin Valley, and San Joaquin County Health Services Employees Guild in Stockton. Engels said the Atwater clinic is receiving a grant award of $650,000 from the program.
A total of 27 clinic organizations in California are collectively receiving more than $17 million, Engels added – the largest total of any single state.
Castle Family Health opened in 2006, and in 2010 was designated as a “look-alike” program by the federal Bureau of Primary Health Care. Peter Mojarres, Castle Family Health’s CEO, told the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative that the “look-alike” designation allowed the center to operate in a fashion similar to a full-fledged Federally Qualified Health Center, but without access to grants, malpractice insurance benefits and other key elements.
Kennedy said the Atwater clinic was chosen as the site for Thursday’s announcement because it was one of only 66 “look-alike” centers nationwide chosen for the upgrade to become a full FQHC, sifted from about 600 applicants.
“I’m so happy to be able to give you something that you should have been given a long time ago,” Kennedy told Mojarres, “and that’s going to expand your ability to extend patient care to even more people in this community.”
Mojarres said in an interview that his organization sees between 33,000 and 34,000 patients over about 185,000 visits annually, working with an annual budget of between $31 million and $32 million.
About 71% of those patients are covered by Medi-Cal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program for low-income residents.
In response to questions, Kennedy disputed accounts that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act backed by President Donald Trump and passed by Congress in mid-2025 would result in about $1 trillion in cuts to the Medicaid program by 2037. The specter of such significant reductions were a major source of concern to operators of FQHCs in the Valley.
“The Congressional Budget Office, an independent bipartisan agency, found that under the One Big Beautiful Bill, Medicaid will be increased by 47%,” Kennedy said. But, he added, there are people who are being booted from the Medicaid rolls who are not entitled to benefits. Those include “people who are undocumented aliens so it’s illegal for them to get Medicaid, people who have million-dollar homes, … (and) there are people who are being enrolled in Medicaid in multiple states.”
Analyses of the bill by organizations including The Urban Institute, KFF News and authors in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine – citing the Congressional Budget Office – indicated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would reduce federal spending on healthcare by about $1 trillion by 2034.
Still, “in the universe, in the constellation of the federal budget, $100 million is not a lot of money,” Kennedy acknowledged. But, he added, “it is a lot of money for the Federally Qualified Health Centers. Why? Because they have been operating on shoestrings, and they have cracked the code, how to treat Americans, how to do primary care, how to do prevention on very little money.”
Tim Sheehan is a senior reporter and Health Reporting Fellow with the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. The CVJC fellowship is supported by a grant from the Fresno State Institute for Media and Public Trust.