PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center hospital’s future is threatened without health-care reform and depends on it to survive, the hospital’s chief executive officer said.

“If Medicare and Medicaid doesn’t pay us over time, it will probably force us to join with another entity,” Eric Lewis told more than 100 people, who were attending the first of four health-care reform forums sponsored last week by the Clallam County League of Women Voters and OMC and put on at Peninsula College’s Little Theater.

Clallam County has about 16,000 Medicare patients, Lewis said Thursday night, and he expects the hospital will experience more Medicare and Medicaid patients as the baby-boom generation ages well into the 60-to-70 age bracket, but he is uncertain what the costs will be.

Lewis called on those in attendance, a majority of them seniors and living in the Port Angeles-Sequim area, to contact their state and federal elected lawmakers, asking them to change laws on health care that will help contain costs to patients and physicians, and ensure quality care.

Nevertheless, Lewis expressed optimism, saying the hospital’s agreement late last year to become an affiliate with Seattle’s giant Swedish Medical Center is a step toward a brighter future.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Olympic Medical Center is going to change with the times and remain viable over time,” said Lewis, who has 14 years at OMC, first as the chief financial officer and today as its top administrator.

He plans a trip to Washington, D.C., soon to discuss with congressional lawmakers ways to keep the health-care system viable and affordable.

The forum also featured Frederick Chen, public health-care expert and associate professor at the University of Washington.

In addition, Sequim insurance agent Phil Castell and Rose Gibbs, Dungeness Valley Health and Wellness Clinic director, brought to light the fact that health care in America costs more than in other industrialized nation.

Dr. Tom Locke, Clallam and Jefferson County public health officer, was scheduled to appear, but he was attending to a sick family member and did not speak at the forum.

Bertha Cooper, Clallam County League of Women Voters members and a retired health care administrator who organized the league’s series of free health-care reform forums, said this forum, the first in a planned series of four, was intended to set the stage and share with the public a sense of urgency.

The second forum will focus on whether health-care is a privilege to earn or a human right. The third forum will discuss the flaws of the system and the fourth will hone in on possible solutions to the problem.

Forum dates will be announced later.

Chen, a senior investigator in the University of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho Rural Health Research Center and the Center for Health Workforce Studies, said Americans pay the highest prices for physician visits, hospital treatments and prescription drugs and get expensive diagnostic tests like MRIs at a higher-than-average rate.

“We spend far more than any country on the planet for health care,” Chen said.

A third to 45 percent of the health-care coverage comes from commercial insurance, with much of the rest from government sources.

Despite the 2010 Healthcare Reform Act, Chen said, “We learned that employer-based health insurance is not going away,” and that few are willing to change what coverage they now have.

Employer-deducted insurance originated after World War II, he said, as a fringe benefit.

That system has led to a distorted market and inflated costs, Chen said.

About half is covered by employer programs — the rest by Medicaid and Medicare, with about 17 percent of Americans without coverage.

“Those being without insurance have real consequences,” he said, with about 20 to 22 percent of uninsured people using up all of their savings, and in many cases selling off homes and other assets to cover care for catastrophic illnesses.

Since 1999, health-care insurance premiums have increased 168 percent, Chen said.

For employers, the cost of premiums have increased by billions of dollars.

“This is the economic impact,” he said.

“That is why Chrysler and GM are not competitive — because of the cost of benefits.”

At the same time, Chen said, the quality of care in the U.S. is “quite variable” from state to state, even city to city and not necessarily predicated on concentrations of senior citizens.

Will anyone ever be able control rising health-care costs?

“At the end of the day it will probably be like Winston Churchill said, ‘You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else,’” Chen said, prompting loud laughter.

Chen blamed rising health-care prices and wasteful, inefficient and unnecessary medical services for the rapidly escalating cost of health insurance, a spike in the uninsured and the fiscal burdens of Medicare and Medicaid.

That leads many to go without medical insurance, he said.

Insurance agent Castell and free clinic director Gibbs brought real people stories to the forum.

Castell, who has been a licensed agent in Washington since 1987, specializes in assisting clients in navigating the health insurance marketplace, from individual plans to all aspects of Medicare.

He said he found it “deplorable that we live in a country that can’t provide the care that it should have.”

He offered one dramatic example of out-of-control medical insurance costs that affected his own daughter, 31, who was expecting a child.

Her insurance premium at work soared from $140 a month to $500 a month when the child was born.

Group insurance policies, he said, do not necessarily cost less, although many assume they do.

Castell works with a number of small business owners who want to offer their employees health insurance but cannot afford it and have to find ways to get employees on individual plans that cost $540 to $750 a month per employee.

Gibbs, a registered nurse who directs the 10-year-old Dungeness Valley Health and Wellness Clinic, said 70 percent of the clients the free clinic serves are under age 50.

More than 40 percent of those clients are unemployed, she said, and have found insurance too costly.

The clinic saw visits climb from 45,000 patient visits in 2009 to 70,000 in 2011, Gibbs reported.

Her clinic has more than 70 active volunteer and 12 volunteer providers.

She credited OMC’s support for keeping the clinic open in Sequim.

She said the clinic served, for example, an unemployed man who woke up at OMC only to be told he had diabetes.

With hospital release papers in hand, he came to the clinic, she said, and informed volunteers he had no money, no income, no equipment to test his blood insulin “and to top it off he was terrified of needles. If you have diabetes that is a problem.”

Through the clinic, he was able to pay for the insulin and visited once a week, learning how to eat right and exercise.

“He told me a few weeks ago that we saved his life,” Gibbs said.

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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.