SALEM, Ore. — A $670 million health care tax package has passed the Oregon Legislature and now heads to Gov. Kate Brown, providing enough funds over the next two years to prevent Medicaid recipients from losing health care and avoid closing a newly built psychiatric hospital with hundreds of patients and workers.
House Bill 2391 received final approval Wednesday in a 20-10 vote by the Oregon Senate, securing the three-fifths supermajority that’s required for tax hikes.
The bill is now essentially an oxygen supply to the 2017 legislative session that, in its final three weeks, has been hampered by a gridlock between Democrats and Republicans over the state’s financial woes.
The provider taxes, along with other health-related bills, allow lawmakers to fill a huge chunk — up to almost $900 million — of the $1.4 billion hole in the state’s 2017-19 budget that must be balanced by July 10. The remaining gap could be solved through a combination of spending cuts and, if the two parties can make a last-minute deal, tax hikes on businesses.
The package also helps the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid program, continue providing billions of mostly federal dollars to the local economy every year under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which GOP leaders in Congress are in the process of trying to repeal. The system provides government-funded health care for 1 million low-income residents, roughly a quarter of Oregon’s population; more than 350,000 of those individuals were more recently brought into the system through Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
Republican Sen. Jackie Winters, who carried the bill to the chamber floor with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, said the measure reinforces the existing funding structure borne out of the 2003 session.
“It was with the help of the Oregon Hospital Association that offered to assess themselves so that we could leverage federal dollars to rescue and keep the Oregon Health Plan on life support,” Winters said. “Without them, access to health care for our most vulnerable Medicaid-eligible population would not exist and hospitals would face mounting, uncompensated care cost and continuing shifts of cost to private-paying patients.”
HB 2391 imposes a new .7 percent tax on top of the existing assessment on hospitals’ net patient revenue that Winters referenced on the Senate floor. It also creates a new 1.5 percent “premium” tax on health plans provided by some insurers as well as the 16 coordinated-care organizations that facilitate the Oregon Health Plan.
