PORT ANGELES, Wash.—The Olympic Medical Center (OMC), the only public, full-service hospital serving 111,000 people on the Olympic Peninsula, is at grave risk of closure or privatization if Congress passes President Trump’s budget bill with $880 billion in Medicaid cuts. Early on Thursday morning, the House passed a version of this bill that is now heading to the Senate.
OMC is a major issue in Clallam County elections. Last November 5, voters approved a levy to provide millions of dollars to help keep OMC “open and public.” It was approved in a landslide despite rightwing attacks on any form of taxation to pay for vital human needs programs. And candidates are running for election to the OMC Executive Board in the August primary election, including Laurie Force, a retired nurse, who is fighting to defend reproductive rights and public control of the hospital. She spoke recently to the membership of the Clallam County Democratic Party and received a strong ovation.
Robby Stern, a leader of PSARA (Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action), speaking in a meeting of PSARA’s Executive Board on May 15, explained that rural hospitals are especially “ at risk” if Congress approves the huge cuts because these providers depend on Medicaid for 40% or more of their operating budgets.
In 2024, the Safety Net Assessment Program, the Washington State agency that oversees Medicaid funding, approved $12 million in supplemental Medicaid funding to OMC, literally keeping OMC open and functioning. That program faces total termination under the Trump budget plan.
Stern and Anne Watanabe, another leader of PSARA, are scheduled to speak on “leveling the playing field” between Medicare and Medicare Advantage at a mass meeting at Sequim’s Shipley Center, 3 p.m. Saturday, May 24. Stern said the most immediate danger to health care is the drive by Trump and the MAGA Republicans to slash Medicaid, stripping 13,000,000 Medicaid enrollees of all health care protection, many of them children. The cutbacks will also inflict ruinous debt on scores of rural and public hospitals that serve low-income people. It is coupled with $300 billion in proposed cuts to the SNAP nutrition program that provides free and reduced-cost food to millions of poor people, especially children.
The OMC Executive Board is currently in secret negotiations with a number of private hospital chains on a “strategic partnership” to ease the financial crisis, a chronic fund shortfall because Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates fall far short of covering the rising cost of health care. There is widespread fear that Providence, a Catholic hospital chain, may be accepted, endangering abortion rights and end-of-life care that may be banned by Providence.
Already, there is widespread talk that vital services like obstetrics and gynecology will be slashed as part of the so-called “strategic partnership.” Across the nation, more than 200 rural hospitals have gone bankrupt in the past 20 years, and 100 have terminated labor and the delivery of babies.
OMC serves one of the most isolated communities in the nation, as it is about a two-hour drive on narrow highways to get to hospitals in Silverdale, Bremerton, or Seattle. In cases of heart attacks, baby deliveries, and other urgent services, care must be immediate, not two hours away or three or four hours for those living in Neah Bay, Lapush, or Forks.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Republican Senator, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., denounced the “Wall Street wing” of the Republican Party who are “politically suicidal” in voting for this Robin Hood-in-reverse cut in funding for medical care and food for the poor to lavish more tax giveaways to the billionaires. A small bloc of Republicans in “purple” districts feared they may be ousted in the next election if they vote to slash Medicaid and SNAP.
Stern cited Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington State’s 4th Congressional District (CD). Newhouse is one of a handful of Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump. The 4th CD is the most Republican district in the state. It includes Yakima, the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco, Kennewick), and Moses Lake. It is 51.1% white, 39.8% Latino, 2.2% Native American, and less than one percent African American. Medicaid is provided to 38% of the residents of the 4th CD. Newhouse defeated MAGA Republican Jerrold Sissler, a rabid Trump supporter, last November.
In California, Republican Rep. David Valadao of Bakersfield, a dairy farmer, represents the 22nd CD carried by Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 by 11 percentage points over Trump. It is the most Democratic district represented by a Republican in the nation, and two-thirds of the residents of his district are on Medicaid, the highest rate in California. Both, however, voted yes for Trump’s bill. The U.S. Heart Association released a statement recently: “These funding reductions would jeopardize access to affordable health care and food for millions, shifting the financial burden to patients and families…For more than 50 years, SNAP has been a cornerstone in the fight against hunger and poverty, supporting one in five children in the United States…Deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would have devastating ripple effects on children who rely on these meals.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., spoke out against the Trump budget to starve children and poor people and heap billions more in tax giveaways on the rich. “Thousands and thousands will die,” he said.
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