More than three years ago, an elderly Micronesian couple first visited Honolulu’s Kalihi-Palama Health Center (KPHC). Experiencing homelessness, they were seeking help to manage their challenges with diabetes and high blood pressure.

Teko Gabriel, a KPHC community health worker, became the couple’s frontline advocate, providing them with assistance in their native Chuukese language. When the husband was hospitalized this June, Gabriel handled paperwork to ensure the couple had shelter after they were released. Gabriel’s work helped the couple at a time when Hawaii, with its high cost of living and nation’s highest per capita homeless rate, is struggling to provide care and shelter for many individuals.

Staff like Gabriel within Hawaii’s 15 community health centers, and more than 1,400 such centers across the country, fill critical roles in their patients’ lives. For decades, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have supported these health centers as a high-quality and cost-effective solution to keeping medically underserved populations healthy, including low-income, minority and limited-English proficient communities.

Health center providers remain many patients’ preferred choice, even when some have access to other providers through other health plans. Often, these patients’ health coverage does not grant them much access to care. This gap between coverage and care disproportionately affects Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) populations, who are more likely to be low-income, need language assistance, and depend on programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to access the care they need.

Community health centers narrow the coverage to care gap, addressing patients’ complex needs with culturally competent care, language assistance and expertise with key health concerns affecting the communities they serve. They also provide enabling services, such as case management, health education in-language and transportation. These centers are a safety net for those who would otherwise be lost amid language barriers or other challenges in navigating the health system.

Their holistic approach results in improved health outcomes. Explaining her efforts to help the couple transition to a shelter, Gabriel said, “Home is good health. Housing is good education, housing is wellness.”

Community health centers save billions of dollars in health care costs each year but themselves struggle for funding and resources. This includes payment or reimbursement for in-language assistance — required of but often insufficiently met by federally funded health plans — and critical enabling services such as transportation and those addressing social determinants of health, such as housing.

Community health centers need support to sustain the progress they have achieved. Elected officials and all policymakers must continue to invest in health centers, and health plans must partner with community health centers to effectively serve the most vulnerable patients.

With the next open enrollment period underway through January, work to help more people get health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act continues, and community members should continue to enroll. In the AA and NHPI community, 70 members of Action for Health Justice, including KPHC, have reached nearly 1 million people in efforts to maximize enrollment.

Achieving health equity means getting more people covered and ensuring access to effective care. A stronger and healthier America begins with closing the coverage to care gap, ensuring continued coverage for our society’s most vulnerable, and investing in community health providers to fulfill the promise of affordable, quality health care for all Americans.

Jeffrey Caballero is the executive director of Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations, an AHJ co-founding member with Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles.