WAITSFIELD, Vt. (WCAX) – The community of Waitsfield Thursday rallied to save their only primary care clinic, more collateral damage following UVM Health Network’s sweeping cuts last week related to their budget feud with state regulators.
Drivers on Route 100 were laying on the horn as around two dozen workers rallied to keep the Mad River Valley Health Center on life support.
“We are the first line of defense in this community for health care,” said Barry Bolio, an operations specialist at the center, which provides primary care for roughly 3,000 people and has a years-long wait list of some 600 others. “We are and operate at times like a local urgent care clinic.”
The center is caught in the crosshairs of potential closures after the Green Mountain Care Board set limits on how much revenue the UVM Health Network can take in. Providers worry that the loss of the clinic will impact access for local communities, including patients as far away as Williamstown and Ferrisburgh, or those without access to transportation. “This is a drastic impact to the community as a whole, but I think the larger issue is access to health care in general,” said Ryan Gauvin, a nursing clinical coordinator at the center.
Health care costs have been spiraling for years compounded by an aging population and a shrinking insurance pool. A key report this fall by the GMCB offered a grim prognosis of a health care system in crisis and called on lawmakers to find ways to make it more affordable. Recommendations included dramatically shaking up what services hospitals should offer, attempting to save on expensive in-patient care that causes hospital budgets to spike, and leading to double-digit commercial insurance rate increases.
“I think the paradigm shift needs to be not everything needs to happen in a hospital,” said Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction, chair of the House Committee on Health Care. She says the report also highlighted other crucial steps like investing in mental health, substance use treatment, and transportation. “They have the highest cost of care, they are there to treat the most sick and the most complicated and we need to focus on our community supports.”
Back in Waitsfield, providers say their clinic — and the 15 jobs it supports — is part of the solution to keeping costs down and deserves to stay open. “It’s upsetting when there could be other places that we could make cuts to be financially relevant. It hurts, it hurts,” Bolio said.
Network officials said in a statement that while they share deep concerns about the cuts, they must comply with the GMCB’s budget orders. “We recognize the stress and anxiety that these changes are causing our affected patients and staff. Every option we considered across UVM Health Network would have negatively impacted community members across our state. Our goal with each decision was to limit the impact on patients and populations in an imperfect situation, while complying with our regulator’s orders.”