Oregon Lawmakers Plan New Health Care Rationing Program

Oregon legislative leaders said Tuesday that they would not give up trying to create a health care rationing program, despite the Bush Administration’s rejection of the state’s first proposal.

“We’ll have to take a shot at it again in the next legislative session,” state House Speaker Larry Campbell said. “We’ve got 120,000 folks who are going to suffer as a result of this decision.”

The architect of the rationing program, state Senate President John Kitzhaber, agreed that it was important to submit a modified plan. But Kitzhaber said he was not optimistic that even a revised program will win federal approval any time soon because of election-year political considerations.

The plan would have expanded Medicaid coverage to 120,000 of the state’s working poor by covering a smaller variety of medical services.

But Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan announced Monday that the Administration was rejecting the proposal. Sullivan said officials were worried that Oregon’s plan violated the new Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against handicapped people.

Tuesday, legislative leaders and Gov. Barbara Roberts’ office said they were still trying to figure out what steps the state could take to overcome federal objections.

Gwenn Baldwin, a spokeswoman for the Democratic governor, said Roberts hopes that Oregon’s plan will gain federal approval sometime after the November presidential election.

At that point, she said, either Bush will have been installed for another term and will not be subject to political pressure from the plan’s opponents, or Democrat Bill Clinton will be the President-elect.

Clinton has said he would allow Oregon’s rationing experiment to proceed.

“Maybe down the road we will have an Administration that cares about health care,” Baldwin said.