Architect’s rendering of the Pagosa Springs Medical Center Outpatient Wing that opened its doors in 2017.
Increased demand for long-term care through Medicaid is a primary driver of Colorado’s budget expenses, and lawmakers in Denver lament that spending caps don’t allow them to keep up with inflationary pressures in the health care industry — which outpaces the statewide inflation rate upon which TABOR is based…
— from an article by Robert Tann in the Summit Daily, April 1, 2025.
The cost of health care, as journalist Robert Tann correctly noted, has been outpacing inflation for a while now.
Here’s a graph created by journalist John Bortz based on federal data, comparing the inflation in U.S. health care costs with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) between 1935 and 2010.
According to my research, the inflation of medical costs since 2010 has continued to outpace CPI inflation, by a sizable percentage rate.
My conclusion — from listening to the March 31 presentation by Pagosa Springs Medical Center officers — was that the hospital will be coming to the voters in the near future, to ask for a tax increase.
Thus, I found myself thinking about Dr. Mary Winter Fisher.
In October 1959, the Dr. Mary Fisher Medical Foundation was incorporated in Pagosa Springs, with a commitment to establish a family medical practice here. The new Dr. Mary Fisher Medical Clinic was built on San Juan Street, downtown near the Spa Motel, on a site donated by the Town of Pagosa Springs. The little building was a Sears and Roebuck “modular” building, paid for by a combination of community support and a grant from Sears.
About 30 years later, a larger, more modern clinic was built on South Pagosa Boulevard — once again bearing the name of Dr. Mary Fisher.
In 2008, a new hospital was built adjacent to the clinic, and the complex eventually became known as the Pagosa Springs Medical Center.
Dr. Mary Fisher’s name no longer figured in Pagosa’s medical progress.
A few historical facts about Dr. Mary Winter Fisher.
At a time when women were expected to limit themselves to “womanly roles,” young Mary Winter graduated from Hahnemann Medical School, and began practicing medicine in Lewiston, Illinois.
In 1895, she traveled to southern Colorado as a single, 28-year-old woman, and taught for a few months at a public school founded by her sister in La Jara. She then moved to Pagosa Springs and opened a medical office here. She became known locally as Dr. Mary, and she reportedly developed a reputation throughout Colorado for her diagnostic abilities and skillful treatments. She often rode for miles on horseback to attend to her patients.
She married Pagosa Springs pharmacist J.P. Fisher in 1902 and became Dr. Mary Fisher.
The following is excerpted from a short history written by Ila Montroy:
No person was ever more loved nor more mourned than Dr. Mary. She never faltered in her loved profession, whether by night or day, fair or stormy weather, duty always came first during her long term of service. She needs no epitaph, no slab of marble or granite, for her daily task of mercy, charity and love will ever be a monument to a great and noble woman.
My thoughts had gravitated to Dr. Mary Fisher because PSMC CEO Rhonda Webb and CFO Chelle Keplinger had shared a “worst case scenario” showing the Medical Center losing up to $4.3 million in reimbursements this year, if the Trump administration follows through on planned cuts to medical services.
We all know that health care has become unaffordable to the average citizen, with Americans paying twice as much for medical care, per capita, as Canadians… four times as much as Koreans pay… and nearly 12 times as much as Mexicans pay . The causes for this imbalance are numerous, and the solutions are unclear. Higher taxes seems to be a typical suggestion.
But the Trump administration seems to be aiming for lower taxes.
Dr. Mary Fisher graduated from the Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia, and subsequently developed a reputation as one of the finest doctors in Colorado.
Not everyone is familiar with the name ‘Hahnemann’.
Samuel Hahnemann graduated with a medical degree with honors from the University of Erlangen in 1779 and began practicing medicine in various Austrian and German cities, but became dissatisfied with the state of medicine, particularly practices such as bloodletting.
He felt that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did the patient more harm than good:
My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing.
While researching various herbal treatments, he came to postulate a healing principle: “that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms.”
This principle, ‘like cures like’, became the basis for a unique approach to medicine which he gave the name ‘homeopathy’, a form of medicine practiced all across America in the early 20th century, and still practiced by homeopathic doctors in 2025… but not accepted as legitimate by allopathic doctors — the only type of doctors now graduating from American medical schools. So-called “evidence-based medicine” has almost completely displaced homeopathic medicine in America.
Curiously enough, when Dr. Mary was treating and curing patients in Pagosa Springs during the first quarter of the 20th century, she was using homeopathic treatments, and in doing so, developed a sterling reputation, and garnered the love and respect of the community.
We could look back and conclude that those expressions of love and respect are a form of “evidence” that Dr. Mary’s homeopathic treatments were valuable, and effective.
But modern American medical science accepts only certain types of “evidence”. Typically, very expensive types of evidence, often directly funded by pharmaceutical companies.
Should we be assuming that homeopathic medicine, so effective in the hands of a talented Pagosa doctor, is illegitimate? Or has America been fooled into believing that only ‘allopathic’ medicine is legitimate?
One thing is certain. The reign of allopathic medicine in America — and the conversion of medicine from a public service to a high-profit capitalist enterprise — has driven up the cost of healthcare to an unaffordable and disturbing level.
I don’t mean that statement as a specific criticism of Pagosa Springs Medical Center. PSMC, like nearly all medical hospitals in the U.S., hitched its wagon to the most expensive forms of medicine available, believing that to be the only way to effectively treat the people of Pagosa — while doctors in the rest of the world, outside the borders of the U.S., effectively treat sickness for one-quarter — or one-12th — the cost of our American health system.
Instead of looking for more-cost-effective approaches, as used in other parts of the world, America chooses to steadily increase health care costs and the taxes required to sustain an unsustainable system.
And it’s not just our health care system that’s unsustainable.