I guess… I’m right! They don’t have to close! Doc said so… er… in so many words.

“There’s a provision in that bill that hospitals owned by physicians would have to change their make-up or they wouldn’t receive Medicare reimbursement,” he said.

Yeah, the quote is mixed in on another topic from the Tri-City Herald article, but lets go back and look at what Doc published on his web site.

Buried within the bill is a provision that would require the closure of Wenatchee Valley Medical Center facilities in Wenatchee, East Wenatchee, Moses Lake, Cashmere, Royal City, Omak, Tonasket, and Oroville.

As I noted in my previous post, this is a shade off of a lie if not an outright lie. But while Hastings is free to insert the fear package on his publicly funded congressional web site, he is not so free to spoon it out it when the press is nearby, and thus we get the most honest quote of out of Doc in months.

But that has been the leg Hastings has had to stand on. Straight out of the GOP playbook… fear. Fear of losing access to health care in rural areas is a great way to bolster yourself as a great defender. Never mind the Bush war that has never been questioned by Hastings that has cost nearly 4000 American soldiers their lives and cost 400+ Billion dollars so far compared to the paltry 5 billion spent on children in the coming years.