Oregon Health Fund Board Meeting May 21st

Submitted by Mallen Kear on Fri, 05/23/2008 - 12:39pm.

On Wednesday, May 21st, the Oregon Health Fund Board held their all day monthly meeting. I was able to attend the whole day.

At the beginning of the meeting, Drs. Susan Tolle and John Kinsman, co-chairs of the 18th Annual Kinsman Medical Ethics Conference held in Medford in April, gave the board a presentation about the results of the conference. This year's conference was on the "Ethics of Oregon Health Care Reform." After their presentation, several members of the Board expressed the observation that many of the values that came out of the ethics conference are the very same that are being voiced by the public at the OHFB community meetings being held across the state.

The rest of the board meeting was devoted to studying the draft of the report and recommendations of the Delivery Committee. I will not go over all the recommendations, but the report can be accessed online from the Oregon Health Fund Board web site.

The subsections of the Delivery Committee's report illustrate the extent to which the work of the OHFB is not just about expanding "coverage" but instead, in my opinion, reveals a commitment to making system-wide changes. Here are the eight subsections of the report:
1. Primary Care, Managing Chronic Disease
2. Improving Quality, Increasing Transparency
3. New Reimbursement Models
4. Comparative Effectiveness, Medical Technology Assessment
5. Shared Decision Making
6. Public Health, Prevention, Wellness
7. Administration Simplification, Standardization
8. Pharmaceutical Spending

To give an idea of the type of changes that are detailed in the report, let me quote recommendation #1 under Administration Simplification, Standardization:
Increase transparency surrounding health plan and provider administration spending. The state should build on efforts of public and private health plans, hospitals and providers to ensure the development of:

A standard definition of "administrative costs" for health plans
Requirements for all health plans (including Oregon Health Program) to be transparent about the % of premiums that are used for administrative costs and a process for making this information easily available to the public

The next meeting of the board will be held on June 25th. On June 10th, the Portland community meeting for the OHFB will be held from 7 - 9 pm at Ainsworth United Church of Christ, 2941 NE Ainsworth. I encourage Archimedes members to attend.

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About Mallen
Before retiring in 2005, Mallen Kear was a staff RN on the medical floor at Providence St.Vincent Hospital in Portland. While there, she was dismayed at the number of severely ill patients who had no health care coverage and who were brought to the medical floor directly from the hospital ER.

After learning about the Archimedes Movement, Mallen became a supporter in early 2006, and started the Eastside Portland chapter in June of that year. When the Healthy Oregon Act was passed in 2007, Mallen followed its progress. She applied and became a member of the OHFB Federal Laws Committee, and attended many of the other committee meetings as well as meetings of the full Oregon Health Fund Board. She has been writing blogs about her observations for the Eastside Portland chapter since January of this year.