By Dr. Cedric Hayden
If healthcare is a basic human need, why are we taxing it? I asked that question as the Oregon Legislature raced to pass House Bill 2391, the funding mechanism for the Oregon Health Plan.
As a lifelong Medicaid dental practitioner, I've spent my career providing healthcare for low-income rural Oregonians. In my local practice, I take some of the most difficult Medicaid cases including people with disabilities living in the adult foster care system with no family to speak for them. I've surgically removed the teeth of children who've suffered much neglect in their short lives. I serve this population because they deserve equal access to quality health care.
With those patients in mind, I voted no on House Bill 2391 and became a chief petitioner to allow voters to weigh in on a very simple question about the most complex and expensive service Oregon provides its citizens. Measure 101 isn't asking voters whether we should fund Medicaid, it's asking them to consider how we fund Medicaid.
The law signed by Gov. Kate Brown is inequitable, unsustainable and patently unfair. It puts the burden of funding Medicaid on the backs of those struggling to pay their own premiums as year-over-year, double-digit rate increases have left families with health insurance payments that cost more than their rent or mortgage. It allowed Oregon's largest corporations, unions and insurance companies to abdicate their financial responsibility for what should be a shared societal cost.
The bill also shifted $25 million from our public schools at a time Oregon suffers from one of the worst graduation rates, highest class sizes and largest chronic absenteeism problem in America.
Most concerning is how the state's overspending on Medicaid caused by recently reduced caseloads created a backdoor for special interests to rob our healthcare dollars for non-healthcare expenditures.
The Oregon Health Authority has declared FamilyCare Health, a non-profit coordinated care organization, should be shut down because they pay Medicaid doctors, nurses and behavioral specialists too much in reimbursements. I helped negotiate a 30-day reprieve in hopes we could work to keep FamilyCare a viable, going concern. Absent any action by the legislature, FamilyCare will shut its doors next month.
Without real reforms and a funding mechanism that doesn't rely on taxing other people's health insurance, the FamilyCare closure is just the beginning of more systemic problems to come. The real threat to Medicaid is passing taxes which can be taken out of healthcare and spent elsewhere.
If you don't believe that can happen, understand that Measure 101 taxes are not constitutionally protected for healthcare. The legislature has a history of "sweeping" funds from vulnerable populations.
Nearly 90,000 Oregonians, from every political affiliation and in every legislative district joined me in putting the question of whether House Bill 2391 fairly funds Medicaid. Like me, they believed the legislature got it wrong.
In a recent Oregonian guest opinion, former Gov. John Kitzhaber wrote that the legislature should take time and come back in 2019 to get Medicaid funding right. With all due respect, we don't have time. In 2019, the budget hole will be larger as Oregon's co-pay for expanding Medicaid will grow to 10 percent. Like Kitzhaber, I've spent my career crafting healthcare policy. However, only one of us has decades of actual experience serving Medicaid patients in practice.
Oregonians must stand together and demand that lawmakers craft a fairly funded Medicaid package, and fix a health care system that is breaking right before our eyes. Voting no on Measure 101 stops bad legislative policy and puts us back at the table to save Medicaid before it's too late.
Dr. Cedric Hayden is Republican state representative from Fall Creek and one of the chief petitioners for Ballot Measure 101, which goes before voters in early January
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