Ashland Community Hospital’s childbirth and inpatient services will be consolidated to Asante’s Medford medical center.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Another Oregon health care organization is making cuts.

The brick-and-mortar Ashland Community Hospital will shutter in 2026, Asante revealed on Wednesday. The Medford-based medical care provider announced that the facility will continue operating through the year before transitioning into a “satellite campus” of the nearby Rogue Regional Medical Center in the spring.

In a statement, Asante President and CEO Tom Gessel said the “transition is the only option” as health care entities across the U.S. — and specifically in Oregon — continue to struggle. He noted that the Ashland Community Hospital has “lost millions of dollars” over the past year, as the facility simultaneously recorded a significant decrease in birth rates and inpatient admissions.

According to Asante, 37 Ashland residents have given birth in the hospital so far in 2025. Meanwhile, the organization reported that the demand for outpatient services and emergency department visits has risen.

“Legislation implemented in Salem has put hospitals in an untenable situation,” Gessel added in a statement, in part. “This will only worsen with the future reductions to Medicaid funding. For smaller communities like ours, consolidating duplicative services are inevitable — especially those in such close proximity. What this means for the Ashland campus is to maintain emergency and outpatient services being used most by residents, while consolidating services that are underutilized.”

The Asante announcement comes days after Portland’s Vibra Specialty Hospital announced it will cease operations around Feb. 1, 2026. The closure will impact 310 employees.

The Oregon Nurses Association has condemned both organizations’ decisions to cut back, arguing that workers and patients deserve “long-term investments” in medical care.

“These closures represent a devastating loss of critical healthcare access for Oregonians, forcing patients to travel farther for care, increasing risks in emergencies, and placing additional strain on an already overburdened health system,” ONA said in a release.

Providence Seaside Hospital also stopped offering labor and delivery services earlier in October of this year.

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A double punch of Oregon hospital facility closures drew condemnation Thursday from the Oregon Nurses Association, which cast the developments as “a devastating loss of critical health care access for Oregonians” that will strain an already overburdened health system and force patients to travel farther to seek care.

On Monday came the news that 73-bed Vibra Specialty Hospital of Portland would shutter, leaving Oregon without a long-term acute care hospital, a facility that generally cares for patients with complex needs after they have been stabilized and discharged from a traditional hospital.

Then, on Wednesday, came news from down the Interstate 5 corridor. Asante Ashland Community Hospital, a historic 49-bed inpatient facility, said it would eliminate inpatient services and a birthing center next year as it diminishes into a satellite campus of a larger hospital 11 miles up the freeway.

Under the plan, the hospital would retain its emergency department and outpatient operations. “We want to lean into what services at this facility the community is accessing, which is emergency services in the ED, outpatient surgeries and imaging,” Medford-based Asante said on a webpage, emphasizing that birth rates at the hospital have declined.

Echoing the rationales offered by Vibra leaders on Monday, the Asante CEO said the decision was a response to a worsening financial and regulatory landscape for Oregon hospitals.

“Bold, difficult decisions are needed to combat the headwinds,” Tom Gessel, president and CEO of Asante, said in a statement. “Legislation implemented in Salem has put hospitals in an untenable situation. This will only worsen with the future reductions to Medicaid funding. For smaller communities like ours, consolidating duplicative services are inevitable—especially those in such close proximity.”

The Asante System’s claims of money issues have, however, raised questions.

In 2023 and 2024—the two most recent fiscal years for which audited financial statements are available—the health system reported a collective overall profit of more than $240 million.

Meanwhile, financial data from the Oregon Health Authority says Asante Ashland Community Hospital itself made millions of dollars in 2024 and continued doing so through the first half of 2025, with operating margins that outpaced those of most hospitals in the state.

As The Lund Report earlier noted, Asante, in apparent contradiction to that information, is now asserting in external communications that its finances have gone south. A Wednesday news release from the health system included a statement from the CEO saying that “this past year, Ashland Community Hospital lost millions of dollars.” A separate FAQ on Asante’s website said the “facility is on pace to lose $7.3 million.”

An Asante spokesperson did not respond by deadline to a question from WW about the discrepancy between the information Asante is issuing and state data.

The state says its data comes from information self-reported by hospitals.

That wrinkle notwithstanding, the ONA frames the retreats, just the latest in a wave of Oregon heath care facility closures in recent months, as part of a broader crisis. The crisis, it says, is fueled by health care funding cuts under the Trump administration and the “increasing corporatization of health care, which prioritizes profit over patients and community needs.”

An Oregon attorney accused of relying’ on the totally plausible — and often totally erroneous — output of so-called artificial intelligence was slapped with a fine by the Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday.

The appellate court determined that Portland civil attorney Gabriel A. Watson filed briefs citing two made-up cases and used a fabricated quote that was attributed to a real piece of case law.

In a first for Oregon, the Courts of Appeals ordered Watson to pay $2,000 to the state judicial department, charging him $500 for each baloney citation and $1,000 for the bogus quote.

“Although artificial intelligence programs may seem to offer a shortcut for a busy attorney in an individual case, at present, they may create a long cut to justice,” Chief Judge Erin Lagesen wrote, calling it a “very grave situation.”

The errors were discovered by Watson’s legal opponent, former state lawmaker and retired attorney Charles Ringo.

Ringo, representing himself, sued architectural designer Jennifer Cohoon in 2023, claiming her firm had created faulty plans for remodeling a duplex he owns in Bend.

An arbitrator sided with Cohoon in January and ordered Ringo to pay $1,200 plus $15,000 in fees to Watson, her attorney.

Ringo appealed and the case went haywire in May, when Watson filed the bunk-filled brief with the appellate court.

Ringo said he spent several hours chewing over Watson’s document, eventually making a trip to the Bend library to check legal databases and confirm his suspicions that Watson’s arguments were bolstered by fake decisions in prior cases that never happened.

“I had to consider whether maybe there was just an innocent mistake in terms of the name of the case or the case citation numbers,” he said. “You have to check all sorts of variations to make sure that, no, this just doesn’t exist.”

Watson, for his part, tried to explain the error by saying that his assistant had mistakenly filed a “draft/placeholder” brief.

He later acknowledged and apologized for the apparently AI-generated errors, asking the court not to sanction him.

“As a solo practitioner, with a heavy case load, and a desire to fight for justice for all clients, there is an inherent risk of becoming overwhelmed,” he wrote. “The temptation of relying on technology to support these well-intentioned goals is strong.”

But the court had none of it.

Lagesen, the judge, said Watson hadn’t provided a “clear explanation” of how the error occurred and that each false brief created by AI costs the judicial system time and money untangling the mix-up.

Legal precedent is the backbone of the law, Lagesen said, but artificial intelligence is a machine built on the probable order of words, not the truth itself.

AI mistakes are sometimes dubbed “hallucinations.” But Lagesen rejected that term.

“Artificfial intelligence is not perceiving nonexistent law as the result of a disorder,” she wrote. “Rather, it is generating nonexistent law in accordance with its design.”

Watson didn’t respond to requests for comment. Cohoon learned about the matter from a reporter and declined to comment.

Oregon federal judges have encountered AI errors in at least two cases so far, The Oregonian/OregonLive previously reported. U.S. District Judge Michael Simon declined to impose sanctions against attorneys for Green Building Initiative on Nov. 12, ruling that he was “satisfied with the remedial actions already taken.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke has not yet ruled on a similar matter in Medford.