Alan Bates |
Ben Westlund |
Could be that no piece of legislation passed in any Northwest legislature in this decade turns out to be as important as Oregon's Senate Bill 329. If it is passed and does what it sets out to do, it could transform the provision of health care in Oregon and could make the state a national model for starting the mending of a thoroughly broken system. It sounds ambitious and it is - it is breathtaking.
The immediate point here is that, while certainly no done deal, odds on its passage now appear favorable. Having just (Tuesday) cleared subcommittee action, it has won a hard-to-get spot in the Friday meeting of the Joint Ways and Means Committee (a development suggesting significant legislative push) and if passed there, goes directly to both House and Senate floors. We've heard (some days back) one senator say the bill looks likely to pass; the mood depicted to us today by one well-informed Senate staffer could be described as apprehensively optimistic.
As significantly, Governor Ted Kulongoski was today publicly talking through the second, third and fourth steps for dealing with what comes next out of this bill, something we suspect he would decline to do if the bill were in the problematic category.
If all this materializes, the impact of this legislative session on environmental, education and consumer matters may be dwarfed by the eventual effect of this bill. This bill, with its associated actions and followup measures, fairly could be fairly described as large-scale health care reform.
Such ambition would be more questionable in other arenas. This bill, whose principal backers are Senators Ben Westlund, D-Tumalo, and Alan Bates, D-Ashland, is so large-scale, so sweeping in its effect, that one of the core certainties about it is that there will be unintended consequences, and probably not a few of them. But what it would uproot is so core-rotten that the odds of significant improvement are likely.
Let's draw back a bit to take a look at this - of all governmental policy activities this year, this one may be most worth it.
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