Big choices ahead devising health
care plan to cover all Oregonians
Cheers to union fundraising program
Jeff McDonald (left), secretary-treasurer of United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 555, leads a toast for retiring Local 555 President Gene
Pronovost, at the finish of the 12th annual Pronovost Foundation Golf
Tournament. The event raises money for college scholarships and to fight
leukemia. This year, 13 scholarships totaling $14,000 were awarded to
members of Local 555, their children and/or spouses. An additional $20,000
was collected for the Leukemia Foundation. Pronovost is retiring at the end
of the year after serving four terms as president of the largest private-sector
union in Oregon. Since its inception, the fundraiser has donated more than
$135,500 to the Leukemia Foundation and doled out $112,600 in scholarship
money to Local 555 members and their families.
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SALEM — A complicated pro-
posal to require health insurance for
all Oregonians is nearing the next
phase. Six citizen committees that
have worked on different parts of the
plan since last winter are finalizing
their recommendations to the gover-
nor-appointed Oregon Health Fund
Board. That Board was conceived by
last year’s Senate Bill 329, which was
itself the work of a 2006 interim Sen-
ate commission.
Now the seven-member Oregon
Health Fund Board will have until Oc-
tober to decide what to propose to the
Legislature for its 2009 session, which
begins in January. Oregon AFL-CIO
President Tom Chamberlain is labor’s
representative on the Oregon Health
Fund Board.
As spelled out by SB 329, the
“Oregon Health Fund” is supposed to
require all uninsured Oregonians to
purchase private health insurance, but
also make it available to them at an af-
fordable rate through subsidies, tax
credits, and, maybe, pooling purchas-
ing power.
Organized labor was broadly repre-
sented on the committees, but some of
the unionist committee members are
disappointed with recommendations
that fell short of gutsy.
“If our vision is too small, we will
get nothing,” said Lynn-Marie Crider,
a health policy expert who works for
Service Employees International
Union Local 49.
Crider served on the Oregon
Health Fund Board’s Finance Com-
mittee, which was supposed to pro-
pose how to pay for the insurance that
600,000 presently uninsured Oregoni-
ans would be required to get. The
committee failed to reach consensus
on how to pay for the plan, and in-
stead put forward several options, in-
cluding funding it entirely with an em-
Q
ployer payroll tax — or combining a
payroll tax with a tax on health care
providers or on higher-income Orego-
nians.
Crider said too little is being pro-
posed to restrain health care costs, a
view echoed by Teamsters Local 206
Union Representative Stefan Ostrach,
who served on the Board’s Delivery
Systems Committee. His committee
was supposed to look at ways to rein
in costs, but Ostrach said they ignored
that charge. In the end, he produced a
minority report to the Board.
“The direction this whole process
seems to be going,” Ostrach wrote,
“will be a boon for insurance compa-
nies, forcing hundreds of thousands of
individuals to buy their products —
and a boon for hospitals, relieving
them of the cost of charity and other
uncompensated care.”
Ostrach faulted his committee for
failing to propose any mechanism to
redirect those insurance and hospital
windfalls to defray the costs of insur-
ing the uninsured.
Meeting with the Oregon Health
Fund Board for the first time June 11,
Gov. Ted Kulongoski, too, stressed
that the Oregon Health Fund won’t be
able to expand and sustain health care
coverage if it doesn’t control and re-
duce health care costs.
Kulongoski also told the Board
what his health care priorities will be
for the 2009 legislative session. A re-
quirement that all uninsured Oregoni-
ans buy health insurance along the
lines envisioned by the authors of SB
329 was not on the list. Instead, the
governor wants to expand enrollment
in the Oregon Health Plan (the exist-
ing health insurance plan for low-in-
come Oregonians), and make another
attempt to expand children’s health in-
surance using a tobacco tax increase.
[Last year, the Legislature referred
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PAGE 2
such a proposal to the ballot, but vot-
ers rejected it.]
Chamberlain said he took the gov-
ernor’s message as a warning that the
Oregon Health Fund Board has to be
pragmatic; a comprehensive health in-
surance program won’t be able to be-
gin all at once, but will need to be
rolled out in increments. And expand-
ing health coverage among children
and lower-income Oregonians would
be a first step.
“If next year the Legislature ex-
pands the Oregon Health Plan by
100,000 and provides insurance to
125,000 children, that’s a third of the
uninsured,” Chamberlain said.
Kulongoski’s goals are compatible
with the comprehensive insurance
mandate outlined by SB 329, said Ben
Westlund, the act’s co-sponsor last
year in the Oregon Senate.
“[SB 329] does call for a compre-
hensive plan to be introduced in
2009,” Westlund said. “That doesn’t
mean you push a magic button and
achieve those goals in six months or a
year.”
Westlund said political considera-
tions will have to figure in what the
Board proposes. Westlund himself is
leaving the Senate to run for state
treasurer, and faces Republican Allen
Alley, Kulongoski’s former economic
development adviser, for the office. If
he wins, Westlund said he will use the
higher-profile “bully pulpit” of the
statewide elected office to continue his
advocacy of health care reform.
“We’ve got to build a very strong
coalition,” Westlund said — in order
to bring about the comprehensive
health care program the Legislature
committed to in SB 329, “because
we’re getting to the point in the deci-
sion-making process where there are
going to be winners and losers.”
Building a better mousetrap does-
n’t mean anything, Westlund said.
“Passing it through the Legislature —
that’s something. The sad truth is it’s
easy to kill a bill in committee, and the
bigger the bill, the harder it is to pass.”
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