Salud Family Health in Estes Park is facing a $1 million deficit, and the community needs to step up with more than sympathy — it needs to take action.
The most immediate and practical solution is for the Park Hospital District and UCHealth to dedicate a portion of the $4.6 million in annual property tax revenue collected from local property owners to help sustain primary care for uninsured and underinsured residents.
That idea deserves serious consideration.
More than 75 people gathered two weeks ago at Mama Rose’s for a fundraising dinner benefiting the clinic’s foundation. About $14,000 was raised. The Estes Park clinic needs much more to keep its doors open this year alone.
Salud serves 1,700 patients annually — roughly 29% of the Town’s year-round population, according to Timothy Nagel, the clinic’s medical director. These are the housekeepers, landscapers, restaurant workers, and others who keep the local economy running.
“These are the people who make this community work,” Nagel told the diners. “They are the backbone of Estes Park.”
If the clinic closes, many of those residents will delay care until their conditions worsen, forcing them into urgent care or the emergency room — the most expensive and least efficient settings for routine medical treatment.
That is not just a health care problem. It is an economic and moral failure.
When voters created the Park Hospital District in 1968, they did so to ensure local residents had access to health care close to home. That mission did not disappear when UCHealth acquired Estes Park Health on Dec. 1 2025.
Today, the Park Hospital District’s sole function is to collect taxes and transfer those funds to UCHealth. While that arrangement may secure hospital operations for the time being, it does not address the pressing need for affordable primary care for the workers and families who are the backbone of this community.
Salud fills that gap.
The clinic operates on a sliding fee scale, allowing patients to receive medical and dental care without having to choose between paying for treatment and paying for groceries, rent, or gasoline.
Dental hygienist Susan Whitehead described how Salud’s integrated care model recently identified a child with a potentially life-threatening sleep disorder. Nagel explained how Salud helped another child whose vision problem turned out to be a brain tumor to access the care he needed.
Those stories underscore what is at stake. Primary care is essential care. It saves lives. It is also cost-effective care. When people do not have access to primary care, they delay care until they wind up in more expensive urgent care and emergency room settings with more complicated acute healthcare problems.
Federal funding for community health centers has remained essentially flat for more than 15 years, even as health care costs have soared. Congress should do more, but Washington’s dysfunction does not relieve local leaders of responsibility.
As a community, Estes Park can lean in to address this problem locally.
The Park Hospital District board and UCHealth should work together to develop a sustainable funding plan for Salud. Local residents should urge them to do so through letters, emails, and a petition drive.
Click here for a PDF of a petition asking the Park Hospital District Board, the UCHealth Estes Valley Medical Center Board, and UCHealth Northern Colorado to come together with the board of the Salud Family Health Centers and the Estes Park Salud Foundation and find a workable solution.
Print a copy — or two — sign it, and share it with friends and neighbors. Then forward it on to the board members who need to have a serious conversation about the future of primary healthcare in the Estes Valley.
At the end of the day, the people who work in Estes Valley businesses, who clean hotel rooms, prepare meals, maintain properties, and care for our children, who are disabled, or who have retired here with fixed incomes, should not have to go without health care because they cannot afford it or because the primary health clinic had to close its doors.
As a community, we have an obligation to care for our neighbors.
The names, public addresses, and public email addresses of board members are:
Park Hospital District Board (elected by the taxpayers of the Park Hospital District),
Cory Workman – cworkman@parkhospitaldistrict.org; Steve Alper – salper@parkhospitaldistric.com; Brigitte Foust – bfoust@parkhospitaldistrict.com; Janet Zeschin – jzeschin@parkhospitaldistrict.com; and Tom Leigh – tleigh@parkhospitaldistrict.com; 1230 Big Thompson Avenue, Estes Park, CO 80517
UCHealth Estes Valley Medical Center Board (appointed by UCHealth)
Kevin Unger (President and CEO) – kevin.unger@uchealth.org; Grace Taylor (President, Greeley Hospital) grace.taylor@uchealth.org; Stephen Alper salper@parkhospitaldistric.com; Janet Zeschin jzeschin@parkhospitaldistrict.com, David Batey, Sue Cooper, and Christina Kraft, 555 Prospect Ave., Estes Park, CO 80517
UCHealth Northern Colorado
Kevin Unger, President and CEO – kevin.unger@uchealth.org
2315 E. Harmony Rd, Suite 200, Fort Collins, CO 80528