Making Case for Healthy Kids
By Don Colburn, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Jan. 23–Gov. Ted Kulongoski led off a dozen witnesses Monday in a controversy-free initial hearing on his plan to provide health access for all Oregon children.
“This is the moment,” he said, to bring coverage to an estimated 118,000 Oregon kids who lack health insurance.
The real test of Kulongoski’s Healthy Kids Plan, a keynote of his second-term agenda, will come later. The House-Senate health care panel he addressed Monday listened politely without debate. None of the 14 attending legislators, from both parties, asked the governor or any other witness a single question.
“This is a quiet group, Mr. Chairman,” Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson, D-Gresham, said to her co-chair, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, as she gaveled the 90-minute hearing to a close a half-hour ahead of schedule.
“Today was a courtesy day,” Greenlick said later.
“It’s not that we don’t have any (questions),” said Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg. “But it wasn’t the time or place.”
Greenlick said “much more serious questions” would come in a follow-up hearing on Wednesday. That’s when Kulongoski’s health policy advisers appear before the joint committee. A vote on the governor’s plan could come as early as Friday, he said.
But that would be only the first in a series of steps toward enactment. Next, the bill would go before the revenue committees, and from there to the House Ways and Means, to examine the impact on the budget.
Perhaps the plan’s most controversial feature, especially among anti-tax Republican legislators, is the way it would be paid for. Kulongoski has proposed an 84 1/2-cent increase in the cigarette tax, bringing the state excise tax to $2.02 a pack, matching Washington state’s as the nation’s third-highest. Kulongoski did not mention the tax increase in his testimony.
Kruse said he supports the goal of making sure all children have access to health care but opposes “niche taxes” such as the cigarette tax increase, because “it’s not appropriate for a majority to tax a minority.”
Kulongoski said the “worst failure” of the health care system is the high number it leaves uninsured — more than 600,000 Oregonians, including 118,000 children younger than 19.
Uninsured children, Kulongoski told the committee, “are less likely to get preventive health services, less likely to get medical or dental care when they need it, and less likely to learn and thrive as they grow up.”
A majority of the state’s uninsured children, he said, live in families with one or more working adults. They make too little to afford private insurance and too much to qualify for government coverage under Medicaid, the federal-state health plan for low-income residents.
Kulongoski called his Healthy Kids Plan “sensible, responsible and practical.” He said it would help Oregon leverage more federal matching funds and improve outreach to sign up the estimated 60,000 children who are eligible but not enrolled in state-paid insurance.
The state would pay the full premium for children in families with annual incomes below $40,000. Families with higher incomes would pay premiums on a sliding scale up to 100 percent for an annual income of $80,000.
Proponents of universal health insurance — coverage for all Oregonians — seem ready to back children’s coverage as an important first step. Kulongoski said he was among them.
“We must not let our pursuit of that larger goal distract us from enacting this proposal,” he said. “And we must not keep our children waiting any longer.”
When an uninsured person goes to the emergency room at Salem Hospital, the average charge is $750, Dr. James Lace, a Salem pediatrician, told the committee. The unpaid costs of such bills get shifted onto premiums and charges paid by insured patients, he said.
“This is everyone’s problem,” said Rep. Tina Kotek, D-Portland. “A virus or an infection doesn’t care if a child has insurance.”
Oregonians for Health Security, a union-backed coalition that favors universal coverage, arranged for several families to testify in favor of the governor’s plan at Monday’s hearing. Among them was fourth-grader Jack Hollywood, who is on the Oregon Health Plan but has been unable to get timely, effective treatment for a painful condition called swimmer’s ear. He testified with his father, Charles Hollywood.
“Dear Governor Kulongoski,” said Jack, reading from a prepared text. “I do not feel good about my ears. . . . I wish they could be fixed.”
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