Healthy Oregon Act designed to give health coverage to all Oregonians

Health Fund Board appointed by Governor Kulongoski meets for first time in Wilsonville on Tuesday at 1 p.m., Governor will come speak to them

By Bob Schoenberg

The Regal Courier, Oct 1, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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Sen. Ben Westlund, at a presentation hosted by House District 35 Representative Larry Galizio in King City Sept. 26, talked about what he hopes the “roadmap” for health care reform in Oregon is going to be like when the 2009 State Assembly meets and votes on a near universal Oregon health care package.

Westlund mirroring the concerns of others in Oregon about the costs of health care, like Sen. Ron Wyden and former governor of Oregon John Kitzhaber, said that the expense of providing health care is leading Oregon into a health care crisis.

The State Senator from Bend said that he and others have looked at the current status of prices for health care, and that, although it is way too high, people in Oregon, so far, are paying the price.

“But more than that . . . this will not be sustainable. I don’t care what health care you’ve got, or think you have, or maybe you don’t have any . . . but whatever health care you’ve got, we can’t continue to pay for it at the rates and the costs that are currently being charged. This is a crisis of enormous economic proportion.”

He said that not only are Americans paying twice as much for health care services than other industrialized countries such as Sweden, France, England or Canada, Americans are getting the worst outcome of that service.

“Yet we have access, as Americans, without question, to the best doctors, the best hospitals and the best medical technology in the world. Something is wrong, something is desperately wrong. And it is getting worse.”

During the 2007 session of the State Assembly, to address the coming crisis in health care costs, Westlund explained that the State Legislature passed the Healthy Oregon Act to address this crisis.

On Tuesday afternoon starting at 1 p.m., the Health Fund Board named by Governor Kulongoski this past August will meet for the first time to start planning what Westlund called the “blueprint” for providing Oregonians with a health care plan that includes everyone in the state while promising to reduce costs.

He said one of the things gone wrong in American health care is that the system does not make preventative care the number one priority.

He said that Americans already have universal health care. That anyone who is sick enough can go to any emergency room at a hospital and they will get top of the line care.

But that it does not do as much good for those who are uninsured using the emergency room as a last resort, by that time they have taken too long to get proper health care.

“We get to the illnesses late in the disease cycle,” said Westlund, “when they are much more costly to treat and the outcome is nowhere as good as in other industrialized counterparts. The single biggest cost to health care is (for) those that don’t have it.”

He explained that it is those that have health care insurance that are paying the extra price for those emergency room visits, and that by reducing visits of that type by insuring everyone and practicing preventative health care, it will reduce the costs for everyone.

Another example of how the health care system spends more than necessary, Westlund said, is duplication of services that are not necessary to provide complete health care to a region.

In Bend, he told the audience of about 25 at the King City Civic Association Town Hall, there are seven MRI machines.

“That’s nuts . . . Who is paying for all that? All of us,” he answered.

He said the overall system we have built in America for providing health care gives private hospitals and clinics the incentives for building more and more duplicated services like MRI imaging machines.

“We have the wrong incentives and incentive utilization. What we don’t have is the incentives for wellness.”

He said getting the right incentives in the proper place is what every other countries in the industrialized world does.

Westlund hopes that a proposal to address the problem of too much expensive equipment would take the form of a certificate of need program.

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