Clinic’s abrupt closure leaves North State patients without care

Corning resident Glenna Secreto was scheduled to have a post-surgery check-up at Tarichi Primary Care in Corning last month. However, on Jan. 14, she found the clinic had been shut down a week earlier.

Secreto’s 95-year-old mother, Ada Boatman, had an appointment at the same clinic that morning. When Boatman reached the clinic, she saw the door locked, people pulling up for appointments, and a posted notice.

Secreto later found a new clinic for herself and her mom, but neither of them could get an appointment until the end of February when her mom will be able to get needed medications. Secreto, though, had to make a drive of more than two hours to St. Helena for her post-surgery check-up.

The notice on the clinic door stated that the closure was due to “the current administration’s poor choices to defund medical insurance reimbursement” and delays in paying legitimate insurance claims caused by the government shutdown.

Tarichi is one of about 150 clinics that have shut down from California to Maine since H.R. 1 — the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill — that cut health care funding was passed last July, according to the affordable healthcare advocacy organization Protect Our Care.

Political battles over government funding have translated to the real suffering of rural local communities, healthcare advocates say.

 H.R. 1, cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, said Vaishu Jawahar, director of Policy Programs at Protect Our Care in an email to ChicoSol. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the cuts could reach $1.1 trillion.

“Doctors and hospitals face cuts to reimbursement that threaten their ability to continue serving their communities,” Jawahar said. “Many health care providers, especially in rural areas, are already facing slim margins and are coming to the realization that they won’t be able to weather the GOP’s blow, forcing them to close their doors.”

Furious complaints about the clinic

Secreto said her cholesterol and blood pressure pills were running out, and added that she was feeling devastated.  

Secreto and her mom were not the only patients whose lives were impacted by the clinic shutdown. Many patients of the clinic expressed dissatisfaction and anger about the sudden closure and lack of notification in a Facebook group, some questioning if the clinic’s actions constituted “patient abandonment.”

Chance Graham, assistant practice manager of Tarichi, said some patients were notified, but others were not.

“The notification did go out,” Graham said. “But not all of the patients were in the new EMR (Electronic Medical Record) system. We were in the process of getting all of the patient information transferred to the new system, but we didn’t get that completed before the closure. So not all of the patients got notified, but the ones that were in the system did get notified.”

Angela Hamilton, who lives in Red Bluff and first posted the information of the shutdown to the group, told ChicoSol that her husband, Josh Hamilton, was a patient at Tarichi covered by California’s Medicaid program, or Medi-Cal.

Josh, a local maintenance worker, was receiving temporary disability insurance after being injured in a car accident in November 2025. 

“He is in so much pain and it even led him to the ER,” Angela said. “He is going through doctors’ appointments with MRI and pain management, and is not able to function at his work.”

On Jan. 12, they were going to Tarichi to have Josh re-certified for disability so he could continue receiving benefits while unable to work.

“Walking up to the door locked and seeing the message was devastating,” Angela said last month. “He hasn’t been paid for about a week. It affects how we can’t pay for bills and even get groceries.” 

Angela said she was shocked by how the clinic handled the closure and the challenges of retrieving medical records.

“To suddenly put a note out like this is just absurd,” Angela said. “Not notifying patients properly, in my opinion, should be illegal.”

Monica Rosas, a North State resident who has multiple types of insurance including Medi-Cal, said she is still trying to find a new primary care provider and is unsure whether one will be able to meet her health needs.

“It definitely made things complicated,” Rosas said. “I have been going there for years.”

Assistant Manager Graham said the clinic was officially shut down on Jan. 7, and she and her colleagues learned the news on the same morning that President Lance Lee read a letter that he had typed out.

Many of Tarichi’s patients were Medi-Cal recipients, “very marginalized people” — Ashley-Michelle Arnold

ChicoSol was unable to reach Lee or other members of the clinic administration for comment.

“Two staff members stayed behind until approximately 1 p.m. calling patients directly and notifying them of the closure and their appointments being canceled,” Graham added. “Dr Lee sent out a letter to all the patients, but it was days later, from what I understand.”

Graham said she doesn’t have enough knowledge to comment on the reason for the closure, but was a bit surprised because the clinic just went through a renovation. Graham lost her job after having worked there since 2022 when the clinic opened.

“I put a lot of myself into that place, and then it just abruptly closed,” Graham said. “So it was a little bit of shock, a little sad to see that chapter of my life end so quickly.”

National politics can impact local communities

Ashley-Michelle Arnold, a Tarichi patient who lives in Chico, agreed that the clinic could have handled communication better. However, she also believes the main problem is the long-standing inadequacy of rural health care and the impact of federal funding cuts, as well as the government shutdown. 

Arnold, who has a background in healthcare administration and advocacy, said many of Tarichi’s patients were Medi-Cal recipients, including “a high number of individuals for whom English is not their native language, so very marginalized people, even outside of being in Butte and the surrounding counties.” 

Arnold said she had a strong sense of appreciation for what they were trying to do for her and for the populations it was serving.

Arnold previously visited Tarichi’s Chico office but was transferred to its Corning location after the Chico office closed several months ago.

After the recent shutdown in Corning, Arnold said her immediate concern was for the patients who are indigent and have mobility issues. “[There were] so many in Chico who could not make the commute to their Corning office,” she said. “Where are they going to get care? There is a critical deficit of accessible care in Butte County.”

Arnold said the shutdown of the Chico office was also abrupt, and that she received no notice in what she would consider a fair or timely fashion. Still, she said she wants to show understanding toward the clinic. 

“I believe that if it was an option for the clinic to be more communicative they would have been,” Arnold said. “They didn’t come to medicine and create a practice intending to leave people in a lurch. They came to close the gap through a myriad of causes, both national and local. What they intended to create is now gone.”

She believes the shutdown of the clinic is the result of national politics, including the passage of H.R. 1 and the subsequent government shutdown that Democrats said was intended to pressure Republicans into negotiations over federal spending priorities. 

“When we see this kind of play-acting on the national stage – you know, theory crafting is fun – but the real implications aren’t felt by the politicians,” she said. “The real implications, the real world impacts, are felt directly at the bottom level, the people with the least amount of power and privilege and unable to access justice.”

Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to health care have ripple effects

The cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were more than a year’s worth of defense spending, and the same bill handed out $1.6 trillion in tax breaks to millionaires and corporations, according to Jawahar of Protect Our Care.

The cuts to health care “are having a ripple effect across the country, impacting everyone, regardless of where they get their health coverage,”  Jawahar said in an email interview. “700+  hospitals and clinics across the country are facing closure or cutting services and staff, health insurance premiums are skyrocketing, and 15 million Americans are getting their health care ripped away.”

The White House says the purpose of H.R. 1 is “eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse” and that it “protects Medicaid for the truly vulnerable.”

At a recent health care seminar hosted by American Community Media, Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, said the expiration of enhanced ACA (Affordable Care Act) premium tax credits could lead to even more clinic and hospital closures.

“The big impact for many people of these tax credits expiring is that they will be paying more and getting less, and it’s just a huge hit to their family finances,” Wright said. “Some will fall to be more under insured. If community clinics, if hospitals, if other providers, have more uninsured and fewer paying patients, that has an impact on their financial stability, on their ability to keep their doors open.”

Editor’s note: When Angela Hamilton dropped by the clinic on Jan. 26, she said the original notice shown in this story had been removed and replaced with a new posting that formally notified patients of the clinic’s closure and provided instructions on how to access their medical records. The new notice did not mention a reason for the shutdown.

Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.