Last week, we had the privilege of meeting with members of our Central Oregon state delegation from across both sides of the aisle. Five of our state representatives and senators took time out of their busy schedules to talk with us, understand the issues hospitals are facing and learn what matters most to us during the upcoming short legislative session.
I want to say a sincere thank you to Rep. Emerson Levy, Rep. Vicki Breese-Iverson, Rep. Jason Kropf, Sen. Anthony Broadman and Sen. Mike McLane for your time, attention and obvious interest in learning, understanding and supporting our Central Oregon communities.
And I want you, our patients and community members, to know that your elected representatives are working well together across party lines in a time when it seems the nation has never been more divided.
As we look ahead to what will be a short state legislative session starting next week, we know that our elected officials will have no choice but to be hyper-focused on balancing the state budget amid federal funding reductions. We support this effort and know it will be a challenge.
We also support a renewed focus on improving Oregon’s business climate, which Gov. Kotek has shared is a priority. It takes a strong sector of businesses to support our tax base as a state.
Our focus for this session is to defend hospitals against additional harm from regulatory burdens that increase waste and inefficiencies in our system without providing benefit to our patients. Oregon hospitals deal with three times the number of regulations as the national average. Many of those regulations have been on the books for decades without review to determine if they are still working as intended. Others are new, but have been implemented in ways that may undermine the original intent of the law.
As former Governor John Kitzhaber recently shared in an opinion piece in The Oregonian, “The accelerating crisis of cost and access overtaking Oregon’s health care system was decades in the making and cannot be turned around in the course of a single two-year state budget and legislative cycle. We need a multi-year strategy, guided by a clear vision of what we want our health care system to look like in 2033 – the values we want it to reflect and the outcomes we want it to produce.”
We couldn’t agree more.
When the world feels chaotic, and clinics and hospitals throughout the country and in our own state are failing under the pressures coming from all directions, taking a breath and evaluating what’s working well and what isn’t seems like a reasonable course of action.
More than anything, we are grateful that our elected officials have heard our concerns and understand that it will take all of us working together to ensure Oregon has a strong health care system for the future.
Sincerely,
Steve
