To keep this community active and healthy the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic was organized nearly 30 years ago by Dr. Roger McDonald, Dr. David Hilfiker, and Dr. Bill Gallea. The Clinic's mission has always been to "provide access to high quality, comprehensive, primary healthcare in Cook County to all users, regardless of financial ability to pay for service." This means that the Clinic is dedicated to the residents and visitors to the community no matter what. Unlike urban practices that can choose to turn people away when they are poor, on Medicare, uninsured or underinsured, the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic has always been available to everyone in the community of Cook County. We have not accomplished this alone; it has taken helping hands. For 30 years Cook County has benefited from the support of the federal government, receiving up to $500,000 annually as a not-for-profit Community Health Center. The SMC has earned this support by meeting the highest quality standards of care in an isolated community. Money, however, does not create good healthcare; good doctors and good people create good healthcare and we have had some of the best.

The doctors who have come to Cook County to provide healthcare over the years have been selfless, honorable men and women who could have made more money in other places, who could have had more free time to be with their families in an urban setting, and who have to be better at what they do than their medical school colleagues because they are so far away from the back-up of medical specialists or other colleagues. They have come to Cook County to practice medicine for an assortment of reasons, but they stay because of the community. If they have to leave, it is often with regret. The truth is painful . . . just as it is not easy to make a living for the citizens of Cook County, it has never been easy to practice medicine here either, as the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic has never been able to afford the number of doctors required to provide all the services that a community needs. The Clinic has been very fortunate over the years, making it with a minimal number of doctors because they have attracted doctors who have dedicated their lives to this community, and they have had young doctors who choose to stay and grow families here - staying an average of 15 years, when the national average stay for a doctor in their first practice is much shorter. The Sawtooth Mountain Clinic and Cook County has been lucky and now the luck is being challenged on a new level.
~ Carol DeSain, Sawtooth Mountain Board of Director