PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center has taken the first of what may be many long looks at itself, and what it sees is “scary.”
That word echoed around the table last month as hospital commissioners looked at rising undercompensated care for Medicare patients and the cost of opening two new facilities in the wake of the Virginia Mason clinic closure in Port Angeles.
Further clouding the mirror is OMC’s plugging other gaps in the Clallam County health-care system.
The medical center subsidizes obstetrician/gynecologists, on-call general surgeons and, most recently, a psychiatric nurse at the Volunteers in Medicine free clinic.
The picture grows darker yet because the medical center is in the middle of three major construction projects, two in Sequim and one in Port Angeles.
The situation is unlikely to brighten, because there is an aging population in Clallam County Public Hospital District No. 2, the central and eastern sections of the county that OMB serves.
Even medical center Administrator and CEO Mike Glenn, while not uttering the “T-word” itself, admitted the hospital may have to seek a deeper public revenue stream through higher taxes.
OMB’s current levy produces about $750,000 annually — barely enough to dent the $6 million in charity care it expects to write off this year.
Eric Lewis, the medical center’s chief financial officer, presented a revised budget for 2006 at the commission’s May 17 meeting. Commissioners expect to approve it Wednesday.
