CHICO — Olivia Owlett chose to do her primary care residency in this Northern California college town largely because it faces many of the same health care challenges she grew up with.
Owlett is one of four residents in the inaugural class of a three-year family medicine residency program run by the local nonprofit Healthy Rural California. She is the kind of doctor the organization seeks to draw to the far north of California, a region with severe physician shortages.
That’s because Owlett knows in her gut what a lack of health care means, having seen family members drive hours to see a specialist or simply forgo care in her hometown of Wellsboro, a hamlet in Pennsylvania. She did rural training at medical school in Colorado. And because her husband attended Chico State, the couple has a strong social network here, making them likely to remain.
“With the growing family medicine residency program here, it’s a great opportunity to bring more doctors into the area, and I’d love to be a part of that,” Owlett said.
Owlett exemplifies what leaders in rural Northern California want more of: doctors trained locally who stay to work in the area. They have ambitious plans to attract more Owletts and expand the medical workforce, but recent state and federal spending cuts will pull dollars out of an already frayed health system, exacerbating the shortage of care and making their efforts more challenging.
“We need help up here, and cutting funding is not going to help us,” said Debra Lupeika, associate dean for rural and community-based education at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine and a family physician at the tribal Rolling Hills Clinic in Red Bluff, about 40 miles northwest of Chico. “We are in dire straits. We need doctors.”
California’s far northern region is a collection of sparsely populated counties stretching from just north of Sacramento all the way up to Oregon and from the Pacific coast to the Nevada border. The shortages are so pervasive that support for one of the costliest solutions — a proposed $200 million health care training campus — transcends partisanship.
“It’s about what are the priorities, right? And health care certainly is a priority — should be a priority,” said California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher, who represents Chico and the surrounding area. “I think it’s been pretty bipartisan, this kind of stuff.”
Republicans in Congress, including the nine GOP lawmakers in California’s delegation, voted in July to cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid. Area Rep. Doug LaMalfa said the bill ensures “those eligible for benefits continue to receive them.” Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled California legislature has scaled back its health care coverage for immigrants who lack legal status.
California’s health care shortage is driven by the struggles of rural hospitals; an aging physician workforce; the inherent appeal to up-and-coming doctors of more urban areas; and the financial pressures of doing business in a region with a high proportion of low-paying government insurance, especially Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the Medicaid program, for people with low incomes and disabilities.
Almost everyone who lives up here is affected by the shortages, ranging from people with complex medical needs to those with simple, straightforward ones.
When Lupeika’s 24-year-old daughter, Ashley, injured her shoulder this summer, she couldn’t get an MRI for nearly a month, despite her severe pain.
Ginger Alonso, an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Chico State, said she drives 70 miles to Redding for OB-GYN care.
The long waits or distances people must travel often lead them to delay or forgo care. As a result, they show up at emergency rooms, urgent care, or community clinics with illnesses that are more severe than they would have been had they received medical attention sooner.
“We see sicker patients, bottom line,” said Tanya Layne, a primary care physician in Chico who recently closed her private practice for financial reasons and works at an urgent care clinic in town, owned by Enloe Health, which also runs the sole hospital in town.
Patients walk through the door with undiagnosed cancers, uncontrolled asthma, raging diabetes, and severely high blood pressure, Layne said.
In many northern counties, specialists in acutely short supply include neurologists, gastroenterologists, rheumatologists, endocrinologists, OB-GYNs, oncologists, and urologists.
“We have whole areas with no specialists at all, or where specialists are so overworked that the waits are really long, and people are forgoing care,” said Doug Matthews, a Chico-based colorectal surgeon and regional medical director of Partnership HealthPlan, which provides Medi-Cal coverage in 24 northern counties.
The health care shortage in the region grew more acute after the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire devastated the town of Paradise, 15 miles east of Chico, shuttering the local hospital and sending dozens of doctors out of the region.
In response, local leaders created Healthy Rural California, which launched a four-year residency in psychiatry last year followed by the family medicine program this year. The group also runs a program to expose high school students to potential careers in health care, and it is behind early plans for the $200 million “interprofessional” health care campus that would train future doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and others.
The startup cost would likely need to come from California’s state legislature, but lawmakers are limited by severe budget pressures. Nevertheless, James Schlund, a radiologist and board member of the organization, is discussing it with officials from UC Davis and Touro University.
“We are building the coalition,” Schlund said, “to go to the legislature with an empty bucket and ask them to fill it with money at the hardest of possible times.”
Meanwhile, medical and political leaders in Chico and Redding, the two largest cities in California’s far north, are each exploring building a medical school, possibly in collaboration and under the auspices of UC Davis, which considers rural medicine integral to its mission.
A medical school, paired with more residency slots, would keep graduating students in the area long enough for them to establish roots, buy homes, and start families, boosting the supply of local physicians, said Paul Dhanuka, a gastroenterologist and member of the Redding City Council.
But some say the region’s small population makes it a challenge to train more residents.
“The number of residents you can accommodate is limited by the ability to get the right kinds of patients with the right kind of cases that give the residents the training they need,” said Duane Bland, a physician who runs the family practice residency program at Mercy Medical Center in Redding.
Dhanuka said that in sparsely populated areas, a low number of childbirths limits how many residents can be trained in family medicine. But that is not the case with other specialties such as surgery, psychiatry, cardiology, and gastroenterology. And, he said, across the whole northern region, “there are multiple hospitals as well as clinics which absolutely are looking for more residency participation.”
Residency programs are largely funded with federal dollars through Medicare, and that funding is not at imminent risk — though the number of residency slots paid for by Washington has not significantly increased in about 30 years.
However, some graduate medical education is state-funded, and in California many of those slots rely on revenue generated from a tax on Medi-Cal health plans, which California voters earmarked for that and other purposes last fall by passing Proposition 35. That revenue is projected to plummet by billions of dollars under changes in the budget law and a similar rule proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Servis and other medical educators also worry about new caps on federal student loans, which could deter lower-income students, including those in rural areas, from medical school.
Altogether, the financial constraints will only make the health care shortage worse — in large part because of its impact on the region’s smaller, weaker hospitals and the burden on those that remain.
It’s already begun: Glenn Medical Center in Willows, about 30 miles from Chico, announced last month it would shut down its ER and hospital services in October after losing its federal designation as a “critical access” hospital, which afforded it higher payments and more regulatory flexibility.
A $50 billion rural health care fund in the budget law will offset a little more than a third of the money that rural areas are expected to lose because of the Medicaid cuts, according to research from KFF. And it’s not clear how, or to which states, that money will be distributed.
Civic and medical industry leaders in Chico and Redding say the message needs to get out that a robust health care system will serve the interests of everyone, across political lines.
“Health care is such a human need, because we all hurt the same, regardless of race, color,” Dhanuka said. “We can address this. And we don’t need to take sides on this.”
This story first appeared on September 18, 2025, in California Healthline. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Authors & Contributors
Bernard J. Wolfson
Senior correspondent and columnist, KFF Health News
Bernard Wolfson reports on the business of health care for California Healthline and KFF Health News.
