For the layperson, it might be difficult to understand the precise impact if Santa Cruz County lawmakers vote Tuesday to shutter the public health agency’s lab and radiology services as part of a larger budget-slashing measure.
However, for the local primary care doctors and physician’s assistants who spend their lives on the front lines treating Santa Cruz County’s poorest, sickest and most unstable people, those consequences are obvious. Some even view them as fatal.
“More patients will get sick and more patients will die,” Jason Johnston, a physician’s assistant in Watsonville working as part of the Homeless Persons’ Health Project, told Lookout. “The illnesses that are the highest risk among those populations we serve will be untreated, will spread further, and will cause organ damage and death.”…