Washita County loses WIC services

CORDELL — A western Oklahoma county has lost its access to nutrition services for young children and pregnant women.

In Washita County, the Cordell Memorial Hospital is contracted to administer the Women, Infant and Children program, or WIC. Hospital administrators announced Monday that it could no longer provide the special supplemental nutrition program.

The program is funded with federal money and usually administered by county health departments. In Washita

County, however, the hospital agreed to provide registered nurses and office workers to Washita County Health Services to fill the need.

“We have to send staff up there, and it just kind of creates a burden on us at the hospital for nursing,” said Cordell Memorial Hospital CEO Landon Hise. “It just got difficult on us to have to staff that when we’re hurting as much as we are at the hospital.”

Rural hospitals in Oklahoma have struggled with an aging population and a population shift to more urban areas. Hospitals in rural parts of the state may see only an average of 10 patients per day, and nine hospitals have filed for bankruptcy since 2011.

Financial strain is also blamed on Oklahoma’s decision not to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act and cuts to payments doctors receive for taking Medicaid patients.

In Cordell, unlike other small-town hospitals, there is no dedicated local source of revenue, like a sales tax.

“That was voted against three years ago,” Hise said, referencing a communitywide vote to end a sales tax. “A year ago, we stopped offering immunizations, and now we’ve also had to cut WIC.”

Another sales tax vote is scheduled for 2019.

“If we were to get that back, we would offer those services again,” he said.

Tony Sellars, spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Health, said it’s a rare situation for WIC services to be terminated in a county.

For people who use WIC services in Cordell, which has about 1,000 visits each year, the nearest alternative site will be 15 miles away in Clinton.

“Right now, about half of the people in Cordell are already going to surrounding counties for WIC services, including Custer County Health Department,” Sellars said.

Cordell’s state senator, Pro Tem Mike Schulz, R-Altus, is aware of the situation and is gathering more information, his spokesman said.

State Rep. Todd Russ, who represents the area in the Oklahoma House, hadn’t heard about the hospital’s decision but said everything has a limit, both in social services and in the budgets that fund those programs.

“There comes a point where you just can’t provide all things to all people,” said Russ, R-Cordell. “We’ve grown some of those services to the point that they’re just oversaturating the system.”

Russ said it’s unfortunate and that he’s sorry that services might be limited or ended altogether, but he said his concern is about entitlement programs that have ballooned in cost.

“We’re at the checkout stand at Walmart with our 6-year-old tugging at our britches wanting that candy bar. And the answer is ‘no,’” he said, referring to Oklahoma’s budget woes. “Don’t make me look like a scoundrel, but there comes a time when money doesn’t solve all things all the time. And certainly, those people are appreciative of those services. But we’ve grown the services to the point we’ve got them; they’re unsustainable at any budget level, probably.”