but they try to paint such a rosy picture
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/results.cfm?story_no=24320The sky has not fallen onTuolumne County health care
Published: September 5, 2007
Amid great concern and sadness, Tuolumne General Hospital (TGH) closed its doors, after a century and a half of operation on June 30. Only long term care and psychiatric care continue at what is called Tuolumne General Medical Facility. It was no fun: Scores of staff members lost their jobs and thousands of loyal TGH patients were forced to look elsewhere for care.
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The switchover to a single provider has not been without glitches and marathon emergency room (ER) waits and backlogged laboratories have been reported in Letters the Editor. And being forced out of a job, even if half-decent employment is found in short order, is never enjoyable.
Finally, the county was clearly better off with the extra beds, doctors, nurses, clinics and labs that two hospitals afforded. Trouble is, we couldn't afford it.
In the past decade the money-losing county hospital was propped up by more than $40 million in general fund subsidies and loans. And last fiscal year, with red ink creeping toward the $9 million mark, other departments were each asked to cut spending by 7.5 percent.
Fewer deputies, shorter office hours, less road maintenance and service cuts in many other areas became the price we were paying to keep TGH open. After a series of ,at times, agonizing public hearings, county supervisors did the inevitable and the necessary: They voted to close the hospital.
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edited to add
luckily I managed to get my and my son's medical records when the Tuolumne Clinic closed in 1999 or 2000, I just happened to go visit my sister and called to get my records and learned they were closing their doors. There were stacks and stacks of boxes of files in the clinic and I got there just a day before they were going to be bought to storage. Don't know if I ever would have been able to track them down if that had happened.