Schrier, Cantwell headline roundtable forum with healthcare leaders from across the region

EAST WENATCHEE — Congresswoman Kim Schrier of Washington’s 8th District, who is herself a pediatrician, convened a healthcare roundtable on Thursday with many of the CEOs, CFOs, doctors, and administrators from the various healthcare centers and institutions around the valley for a singular purpose: To discuss the way forward for our valley with looming cuts to essential funding from the federal government hanging over our heads.

The Trump administration, or more precisely, DOGE, has proposed $880 billion in cuts to the Medicaid program, and the roundtable was intended to provide the lawmakers with information to take back to Washington, D.C. in order to counter these efforts on behalf of the residents of Washington state, which serves more than 1.9 million recipients of the low-income health care plan.

Much of the discussion centered around the misconception that Medicaid is only for the absolutely destitute. But Washington state, which has the highest per-capita income in the entire nation, is exemplary of the fact that insurance has gotten so expensive that nearly a quarter of our residents qualify based on income.

While Cantwell and Schrier noted that, politically, the move to cut Medicaid seems rooted in an administration effort to offset the cost of massive tax breaks for large corporations, making it, in their words, a “wealth transfer from Medicaid,” which is a government-mandated program, healthcare leaders had other concerns as well.

Executives from Confluence Health, Columbia Valley Community Health (CVCH), Lace Chelan Health and Cascade Medical in Leavenworth, in addition to pointing out that cuts could come for less essential sources, all voiced a similar sentiment: That as healthcare is cut in a community like ours, the ripple effect is disastrous. Jobs are lost, of course, and healthcare providers are one of the largest employers in any region. But specialization suffers as well — OB/GYN providers, children’s health, mental health services and more are all cut, forcing doctors with less experience or expertise in those areas to make up the shortfall, while necessarily doing so less efficiently than before these kinds of cuts are made.

There was no sense during the roundtable of anyone who seemed to be trying to protect their own paycheck. In fact, many noted the extreme deficits they’re already running just with the limited resources that already exist.

The entire group of leaders and politicians alike all agreed on one thing: That when cuts like this happen, they affect rural communities like ours the most. Washington’s 4th Congressional District, where the roundtable took place in East Wenatchee, is represented by Congressman Dan Newhouse. While Newhouse has not participated in an event jointly with his colleagues from Washington, his district — comprising the most rural area of the state — is also the District with the most citizens who qualify for Medicaid. As was pointed out in the meeting, a full 70% of children and 24% of adults in the 4th District are on Medicaid.

Senator Cantwell summed up her position succinctly, saying “Medicaid has become a central part of the delivery system for us in the entire country with the Affordable Care bill and its expansion, but in parts of the state like this, where you have a big Medicaid and Medicare population… any kind of federally qualified health center would be very hard to serve if you had any kind of cut to the Medicaid budget.”

The executives at the table had plenty to offer to the conversation as well, notably:

• Lake Chelan Health is one of the last small hospitals in the state that does labor and delivery, and that department is funded a full two-thirds by Medicaid. Cutting funding means expectant mothers will have to be offloaded into Wenatchee or the surrounding area.
• Hospitals across the state have lost $4.5 billion since the pandemic, which puts a huge strain on rural service hospitals that do anything above basic care. Cascade Medical in Leavenworth operates an ambulance service, and since COVID, they’ve been operating at a 12– to 14% negative margin, and are forced to make up the rest of their operations budget with donations and grants.
• As more business comes to central Washington — like data centers — the demand for healthcare grows, and with a system so reliant on Medicaid funding, cuts could deter those businesses from coming here in the future.

One notable real-life anecdote shared at the discussion was about just how obvious the everyday impact is of cuts like this. A resident of the “J” building of an apartment complex in Wenatchee is a Medicaid recipient, and living two doors away from him is an emergency room nurse from Confluence who had a hand in saving his life at one point. Upstairs and 20 yards away lives his counselor from CVCH, who the Medicaid recipient also credited with saving him at another point.

Three lives in the same building of an apartment complex intertwined through Medicaid. With cuts, the man may have no coverage, and the nurse and counselor may have no jobs.

The lawmakers were here, they said, in order to take stories like that back to “the other Washington.”

“This is a crazy idea. This is not a sledgehammer — this is like a ticking time bomb that's blowing up the foundation of the system. And we have to take your stories and go back [to D.C.] and convince these people that it's not even worth thinking about,” said Cantwell.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media