The false economy of Oregon Health Plan cuts
After the state removed 52,000 from subsidized insurance
The Oregonian, Friday, April 18, 2008
Last year on this page we told the story of a 12-year-old Portland boy, Keith Tupper, who almost died after his low-income family was bumped off the Oregon Health Plan.
Today that shameful story is reflected in the findings of a new study reported in a respected medical journal. The study supported precisely the point we made about the Tupper boy: Cutting the health plan may save money in one pot, the state budget, but it drains money from another pot, the state’s health care system, while it makes people sicker.
The new study found that hospital emergency room visits by uninsured people soared 36 percent after the state cut thousands of low-income Oregonians from the subsidized health plan in 2003. The Tupper family of Southeast Portland was among those who got the boot.
Remember Keith? Last year, in an editorial series on Oregon’s uninsured, we described the day in 2006 when he went into diabetic shock and nearly died.
Keith’s hardworking parents, a roofer and a motel housekeeper, earned just a little too much to qualify anymore for the scaled-back state health plan. But they couldn’t afford to buy private insurance or go to doctors the way insured people do.
So Keith’s Type 1 diabetes went undiagnosed and untreated. That led to his frightening collapse while home all alone, followed by his emergency room brush with death and a lengthy, highly expensive hospital stay.
No wonder America’s broken health care system is the most expensive in the world. The nation’s tens of millions of uninsured turn increasingly to emergency rooms that are prohibited by law from turning patients away, and by the time they get there they’re too often so sick, like Keith Tupper, that they need hospitalization.
This grim reality is underscored by the new research, led by Dr. Robert Lowe, director of the Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. The findings can be viewed under “Featured Articles” at http://www.annemergmed.com/.
Basically, the study provided by far the most authoritative look at burgeoning emergency room use after more than 50,000 low-income people were disenrolled from the Oregon Health Plan. Researchers found that uninsured visits for mental health and substance abuse problems increased even faster than visits by sick Oregonians like Keith Tupper.
This spring, the Oregon Health Plan program for the working poor has begun accepting a limited number of new enrollees for the first time in nearly four years. It’s a lottery-style selection process, with 3,000 new slots allotted in March and another 3,000 this month.
Trouble is, more than 91,000 uninsured people signed up to compete in this lottery. It’s a sad commentary on a system in which soaring, uncompensated emergency room costs are passed along in the form of higher premiums for those who do have insurance.
It’s a pathetic, unsustainable way of providing health care. Just ask the Tuppers of Portland.
Comments
There are no comments yet for this entry. Why don't you make one?