This year, Oregon's problems are all yours.
State leaders turned their backs in 2005 on soaring health-care costs and a
growing tide of the uninsured. They shrank, once again, from confronting the
state's clearly inadequate school-funding system.
The state's political establishment has all but run from these two issues.
They'll do more running in 2006, an election year, when Oregonians will
elect a new governor and decide control of the Legislature.
It's up to you this year. It's up to bold individuals, including
independent-minded politicians, to force the Legislature to provide basic
health care for all Oregonians. It's up to citizens to craft solutions to
the school-finance crisis -- and to reform or replace the foundering
Certificate of Initial Mastery.
Health-care access for all should be the goal
Oregon absolutely must make progress on its stubborn health-care issues in
the next year. With a rapidly growing population and a state health plan
that has dropped 100,000 people during the past several years, Oregon's
uninsured rate has grown faster than any other state's.
Now about 615,000 Oregonians, including more than 100,000 children, have no
health insurance and limited access to basic health care. The Legislature
did nothing last year to expand the Oregon Health Plan or curb skyrocketing
health-care costs.
Fortunately, individuals are stepping forward.
Three Oregon legislators are gathering signatures for a citizens' initiative
that would make access to health care a constitutional right in Oregon. For
all three, this battle is personal: Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, is
undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma; Sen. Ben Westlund,
R-Bend, is recovering from lung cancer; and Sen. Alan Bates, D-Medford, is a
medical doctor.
Westlund, Greenlick and Rep. Billy Dalto, R-Salem, also are sponsoring an
initiative that would raise the cigarette tax to insure every low-income,
uninsured child in Oregon.
Meanwhile, a Hillsboro family practitioner, Dr. Evan Saulino, and a
registered nurse, Dominga Lopez, are sponsoring a separate measure for
universal health care.
Former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber is quietly working with top health-care
experts in Oregon and throughout the country to prepare an initiative to
change the public financing of health care in Oregon and provide basic
coverage for every citizen. If Kitzhaber brings his plan to the ballot this
year, Oregon could once again lead the nation toward a better and more just
system of delivering health care.
Renew commitment to K-12 schools
Lawmakers and the governor spent most of last year treading water in wide
circles around Oregon schools. The new year gives citizens many
opportunities to jump in and make some much-needed progress across the pond.
The governor's race and legislative races are good places to start. Gov. Ted
Kulongoski spent his first term more focused on the economy than on
education, leaving school advocates feeling neglected. He has promised to
make schools a central part of his second term, but he'll face challengers
with their own education ideas. These campaign promises could, and should,
energize the state's stagnant conversation about schools.
Voters can pick the gubernatorial candidate who best sees school funding as
both an immediate concern and a long-term investment in Oregon's economy and
quality of life. They can also toss out the lawmakers who've treated
Oregon's schools like shiny red tricycles -- alternately babied and left out
in the rain.
The Chalkboard Project offers another outlet for citizen action. The
nonprofit group of five Oregon foundations, formed in 2004, promises to roll
out an ambitious education plan this year for adoption by the 2007
Legislature.
The group has had minimal influence so far, despite spending millions. But
if Chalkboard focuses its energy and finds its political footing, and if it
mobilizes citizens through its grass-roots base, it could force the
Legislature to support changes that would make schools more effective and
efficient.
With enough citizen help, Chalkboard might even assist the State Board of
Education in replacing the CIM and its twin, the certificate of advanced
mastery. The state needs clear academic standards that are grounded in the
reality of an actual high school, not another exercise in make-work.
Ballot initiatives offer yet another way for voters to speak their minds in
2006. Portland voters, for example, will likely be asked this spring to
approve a local-option property tax or a citywide income tax. Either one
could serve as a basic local supplement to state funding.
Voters will also face a homegrown statewide initiative or two -- and perhaps
one pushed by an out-of-state group called First Class Education. The
group's purported goal is to cut waste in schools in all 50 states,
including Oregon, by requiring districts to spend at least 65 cents of each
dollar in the classroom.
(There's a catch to this wise-sounding idea: Counselors, nurses, secretaries
and little things like heat and lights don't appear to count as part of "the
classroom.")
One wild card in 2006 is a possible lawsuit concerning the adequacy of state
funding. Some school advocates think state leaders have violated the funding
mandates implied in the state constitution. An adequacy lawsuit would be
slow and messy, but it might also force people on both sides of the funding
fight to find common ground.
A little common ground, in 2006, could go a long way.
©2005 The Oregonian