Three bills that are high on the minds of healthcare advocates all cleared a key budget subcommittee on Wednesday morning with bipartisan support.
The bills expand healthcare to Pacific Islanders, develop a plan to get more affordable coverage for working-class residents and set up a general assistance fund to provide housing for disabled homeless people as they await federal support.
Two of the bills -- House Bill 4071 and House Bill 4042 -- passed unanimously, while the two Republicans on the committee split on the third bill, House Bill 4017, which gives $415,000 to the Department of Consumer & Business Services to analyze plans to implement new insurance regulations that would open up the health exchange to legal immigrants and provide cheaper, more comprehensive coverage for working-class residents.
Known in shorthand as the Basic Health Plan, HB 4017 actually would get the state ready to set up regulations for a new set of health plans that could be offered by either commercial insurance or coordinated care organizations.
These health plans would have the state’s help to leverage more affordable rates from healthcare providers and hospitals, and the plans would adopt coordinated care models, particularly in primary care, which are designed to hold down medical inflation while offering more thorough care to patients.
Rep. Andy Olson, R-Albany, supported HB 4017, while Rep. Duane Stark, R-Central Point, said he opposed the bill but he expressed an open mind and wished to talk to its supporters before committing to a final vote on the House floor.
Olson is the chief supporter of HB 4071, which greenlights a new insurance assistance program for Oregon residents who are citizens of the Pacific island groups covered by the Compact of Free Association.
The passage of HB 4071 will make true a promise that Sen. Alan Bates, D-Ashland, made to the islanders living in Oregon, after a last-minute bill to adopt the healthcare program failed last session. He instead shepherded a bill directing the Department of Consumer & Business Services to hash out a viable program, and that agency’s swift action enabled Bates to come through just seven months later.
“These are special people who worked with us during World War II, and they were never granted full citizenship as they should have been,” said Bates, who added that he’d been familiar with the islanders of Palau, Micronesia and Marshall Islands through his father’s war service in the Pacific: “My father came back with fond memories of the people of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, New Guinea and the Philippines.”
These islanders, many of whom have lived in Oregon for decades, would otherwise be eligible for the Oregon Health Plan if not for a discriminatory provision in federal law that does not allow federal Medicaid dollars to support them. But the state can receive 90 percent of the money for private health insurance for these individuals through a separate federal channel, while budgeting $1.8 million to cover Oregon’s share of the costs.
The last bill that the budget subcommittee cleared was the general assistance bill, House Bill 4042, which will put up $1.7 million for the Department of Human Services to find housing for homeless people that the state agency believes will qualify for federal disability insurance because of chronic, disabling conditions such as mental illness.
The state would get repaid retroactively after the people it has supported qualify for Social Security assistance. Bates said it was his intention for the program to use those recouped costs to then help more homeless individuals. “This is a revolving account,” he said. “We just need a little bit of seed money.”
However, not all individuals the state supports will qualify for disability, and Bates said advocates such as John Mullin of the Oregon Law Center will have to continue to fight for this program in future budgets to ensure it can keep going. Advocates would also like to expand the program, which will be initially capped at 200 individuals at a time.
Mullin has worked for 10 years to re-establish a program to assist marginalized indigent adults and childless couples who qualify for few benefits, before finally winning passage of this limited program. For his efforts, Rep. Deborah Boone, D-Cannon Beach, added this addendum to HB 4042: “In a very unusual move, I want to make an amendment from the dais to anoint him St. John.”
