PORT ANGELES — Clallam County faces a “health scare” crisis.
Commissioner Steve Tharinger’s slip of the lip Tuesday was closer to the truth than perhaps he knew.
Addressing the Port Angeles Business Association, the Dungeness Democrat meant to say “health care.”
Still, the “scare” was real enough to Virginia Mason clinic employees who’d received their severance letters Monday and to patients who’d officially learned last week that the clinic may close April 30.
The impending shutdown of the Eighth Street clinic is only part of the issue, Tharinger said.
Its roots lie with low Medicare payments to rural Washington providers and with the county’s aged population that ages further with each new retiree who moves here.
More than a fifth of Clallam County residents are eligible for Medicare, which pays out a national average of $7,000 per patient, Tharinger said.
The figure drops to $4,800 for all Washington citizens (41st in the nation). It plunges to $2,200 in rural areas like Clallam County.
Reforming Medicare may be politically impossible, Tharinger said, so the community may have to manufacture its own solution.
Tharinger spoke not as a cancer survivor who battled lymphoma at Virginia Mason Medical Center last year but as a member of he county’s Economic Development Council.
“There are tumblers dropping into place that will, in fact, lock the door to health care,” he said.
“We’ve got to look at a local solution.”
