Our Mission

Care Free Medical is a NOT FOR PROFIT FAMILY HEALTH CLINIC established to ensure access to affordable health care for the residents of our community. We care for people who do not have any health insurance, or other resources to provide healthcare benefits. Our clinic is achieving it's mission by providing primary health care to needy families and individuals. We practice comprehensive preventive medicine and promote healthy lifestyles with the support of a broad spectrum of volunteer health care professionals and other committed members of our community.

We offer a comprehensive program that addresses many of the various health care needs of our patients including primary family medicine, referral to needed medical specialists, as well as vision care. We provide affordable pharmaceutical services and durable medical equipment. We are able to provide access to appropriate laboratory and x-ray services and to provide nutritional counseling, mental health interventions and a multiplicity of health education services. (All at no charge to our patients!)

In summary, we are making every effort to address the inequities in quality of health care delivery that has become a tragedy in our community and in our world.

Care Free is the re-activation of a concept Dr. Barry and Suzanne Saltman, RNFNP, first encountered in the early 1990's at the invitation of Mr. Tony Benavides, at that time the Director of Cristo Rey (an urban social service agency meeting the needs of thousands of economically underprivileged). Mr. Benavides asked the Saltmans to help him develop a full-time family medical clinic to provide health care for his community of needy people. The Saltmans spent three years promoting, developing and managing the establishment of a very successful and stable family health clinic at Cristo Rey. Upon assuring themselves of its continued success they returned to their own Mason Primary Care medical office with the intention of developing a similar health clinic in Mason Michigan upon their retirement. After 27 years of medical practice, they have retired and the clinic, Care Free Medical Inc., is a reality.

We have established Care Free because it is apparent that there are very serious deficiencies in the availability of necessary health care for many needy people in our community. Children are not being regularly examined, immunized and treated for chronic or emergent needs; routine preventive health care and urgent needs are too expensive for many of our seniors; whole families go for years without the care and support of a primary health care provider and for too many of these folks there is insufficient follow-up after unavoidable visits to hospital emergency departments and urgent care facilities. Often prescriptions for needed medicines are too expensive to fill. Fortunately, the hospitals in our community will not turn these people away when they have medical emergencies. They are then saddled with continually mounting expenses for which they receive no compensation. In addition, services that we, who are more fortunate, take for granted related to visual, hearing, dental and psychological interventions are not readily available to a large number of people. We attempt to identify people in our community who need help in areas alluded to above and help them to obtain needed services.

We accomplish this with the help of a staff that is essentially volunteering composed of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, nurses, medical assistants, social workers, pharmacists, dieticians, and various clerical and ancillary staff.

We utilize space appropriately designed for clinic activities in the lower level of the medical building at 790 Columbia, Mason Michigan and a second location at 3333 S. Pennsylvania in Lansing.

Funding is dependent upon donations and grants from individuals and charitable foundations and income derived from the Ingham Health Plan and various Medicaid plans.

We are presently able to meet the needs of approximately 3000 people. We anticipate adding about 5000 patients at our Lansing location by the end of 2007. If it should appear that there is greater need in this community, (and we believe that there is) we will make every effort to extend the services of the clinic in a step-wise fashion to address those needs by recruiting more volunteers. It is assumed that increasing the number of patients that we see will significantly decrease the annual cost for each patient.

We provide clinical services Monday through Friday totaling thirty-three hours per clinic. We work with an appointment driven schedule. We see patients three evenings a week and two weekends per month, as several of our providers have full-time daily commitments. At the Lansing office we have After Hours Care Monday through Wednesday from 5:30pm to 9:00pm

Our efforts are directed toward a comprehensive preventive medical experience for each or our patients. Medical histories are thoroughly documented; all appropriate immunizations are to be updated; careful medical examinations are provided and warranted referrals to specialists and appropriate laboratory and testing modalities are scheduled. Further, we assure that all necessary medications are made available to our patients.

Our commitment to primary preventive family medicine includes programs designed to enhance parenting and communication skills, smoking and substance abuse cessation, marital and individual psychotherapy and an ecumenical and non-denominational attempt to enhance spiritual health.

Barry and Suzanne Saltman have demonstrated the will and a certain talent to address the needs of the medically underprivileged in our community. They have created a resource that will help many unfortunate people in our area. This can only happen with the help of numerous caring and talented men and women who have come together to help make Care Free a reality. Towards that end, we are actively affiliated with the Ingham County Health Department, Ingham Regional Medical Center, Capitol Area Health Alliance, Lansing Community College and Michigan State University. Further, we need financial support from numerous resources that consider our endeavors worthwhile. With the combined efforts of our community it seems certain that Care Free will achieve its goals.