Operations committee February 2025 update

The Operations Committee of the UHPGB met for the third time on Feb 27, 2025.  

                    Summary by Sandra Coyner, HCAO/HCAO-Action  (SandraCoyner@hcao.org)

• The Committee approved its proposal to the Board (March 24) to have the Universal Health Plan structured as a “public corporation,” like SAIF and OHSU and others).  Because Oregon has good precedents for public corporations, including language for the legislation, our proposal will not be churning purely unbroken ground.  A Public Corporation is not a state agency and is exempt from some state laws, while being required to follow others such as transparency and ethics.

• The same (unbroken ground) cannot be said for the issue of federal waivers, where nobody else has done anything close to what we want to do and the path forward includes a huge number of bureaucratic steps, any of which could require much work and risk of not succeeding.  The committee heard a report from consultants; next month this report will return with minor edits. 

In this meeting the committee had almost no discussion on substantive issues and few changes to the documents presented to it by staff–which were very detailed and informative about current conditions, lacking potentially controversial issues about future directions..  

Next meeting will focus on having a fund in StateTreasury (not the general fund) as a place for UHC monies.  The committee is waiting for proper experts to be hired to advise the committee, before getting into the issue of how to set up and run the Universal Health Care organization when it is established.