PORT ANGELES – There it was again, that T-word, this time for all the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce to see. Olympic Medical Center Eric Lewis reiterated Monday what he’d said less than three weeks before:
The hospital may have to ask voters for more taxes for OMC to remain a local public hospital.
“This is the last thing we want to do,” he said about a tax hike, but the current levy provides less than 1 percent of the hospital’s budget – $825,000.
That barely dings the $7 million worth of uncompensated care projected for next year.
Lewis spoke to the chamber’s weekly luncheon in the Port Angeles CrabHouse Restaurant, citing a recent study that OMC was in the top 1 percent of hospitals for patients’ outcomes from acute heart attacks.
That represented a dramatic difference from last summer’s report that OMC had an above-average mortality rate among heart failure patients.
Both studies were drawn from Medicare statistics.
