The chances are that you or someone in your family has a real life horror story about medical care and money. You might have been hospitalized for a few days, and when you got the bills you were stunned by the realization that you couldn’t possibly pay them… which meant you are financially ruined, bankrupt… in spite of having health insurance!

How likely is it that you have a story like that? The number one cause of family bankruptcies is medical bills. Every year in Oregon there are some 15,000 non-business bankruptcies. Over 60 percent of them are tied to medical expenses, and three-quarters of those have health insurance!

You may be one of the 560,000 Oregonians who have no health insurance, which means that your family doctor is the emergency room. But the ER is so expensive that you, like so many other Oregonians, will put off going there until your pain becomes unbearable, and your life chances are diminished. Oregon loses approximately 27,000 people a year that way.

The U.S. spends $8,233 per person on health care. That’s more than two-and-a-half times the amount spent by any other industrial nation, and yet we get far less actual health care than any of those other nations. On all but a very few measures of health care outcomes, the U.S. ranks at the bottom of all the developed nations. And why is that? It’s because the U.S. has something that the other developed countries don’t have — a for-profit health insurance industry running the medicine show.

It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that health insurance companies are in the business of paying people’s medical bills. They are not in that business. They are in business to maximize profits for their investors. That’s why the biggest health care problem in America is paying for it. That’s why we have to reinvent health care financing for Oregon.

We need to have a state-wide discussion about how to pay our medical bills in state. To make it an intelligent discussion, we have to have the facts about alternative methods for financing health care, as those facts apply specifically to Oregon.

Currently, House Bill 3260 is working its way through the Oregon House of Representatives. This bill directs the Oregon Health Authority to supervise a study comparing at least four options for health care financing:

Implementing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) without modification,
Adding a public option in the state insurance exchange,
Statewide single payer health care, and…
“Other,” an option to be chosen by the study’s investigators.

The bill directs the Oregon Health Authority to solicit grants and other funds from foundations and private sources to pay for the study.

What needs to be done now is to get HB 3260 passed so that we can have that informed discussion. This means that each of us needs to write to our state representative, and simply ask him or her if you can count on his/her vote for HB 3260 which requires the Oregon Health Authority to conduct a study and recommend the best option for financing health care in state. That’s all you have to say, unless you would like to add a brief account of your own real life horror story as your reason for asking.

There are sixty Oregon State Representatives. Find your State Representative here: http://www.leg.state.or.us/findlegsltr/