A merger between a major Willamette Valley health system and a smaller one needs to be greenlit quickly, a group of Oregon lawmakers said this week, pushing regulators to grant an emergency approval that would bypass the normal review process. In its quest to merge with Salem Health, which runs the largest hospital in Oregon, Santiam Hospital & Clinics has now told regulators it is on the brink of insolvency—and could go under unless the deal gets approved within days. The small Santiam health system’s own audited financial statements indicate it has earned more than $10 million in profit each of the past two fiscal years, producing solid operating margins. Still, in a letter this week to the Oregon Health Authority, the lawmakers said they took the Santiam system’s claims of severe financial duress seriously. “We recognize that the Oregon Health Authority has an impo…

Continued delays only increase the uncertainty facing patients, employees, physicians, and the communities Santiam serves.” The Santiam system runs a small hospital and several clinics off Highway 22. The 60,000 unique patients it sees per year pale in comparison to Salem Health’s more than 445,000, but regulators describe the smaller system as offering “crucial access” to health care for rural communities in and around Santiam Canyon, who would otherwise have to travel to Salem or Bend for acute care. The Santiam system says it has “operated on small, break-even or negative margins” for years, preventing it from developing adequate cash reserves. It says that becoming part of Salem Health would bolster it for the long haul. Reviewing this account is the task of the OHA’s Health Care Market Oversight program, which since 2022 has been charged with assessing if health…