There are a number of reasons why your insurance rates keep rising faster than inflation and one of them is the increasing number of state mandates passed by the Oregon Legislature.

 

When the 2009 Legislature began, Oregon had 36 mandates.  These are health care benefits, providers and covered persons that every insurance policy MUST include.  So you pay for them in your policy whether you will ever use those services or not.

 

Oregon's mandates include: Alcoholism Treatment, Breast Reconstruction, Drug Abuse Treatment, Contraceptives, Prosthetics, Prostate Cancer Screening and Acupuncture, just to name a few.

 

So my insurance policy must cover birth control pills, while my Chief of Staff Michelle's policy must cover prostate cancer screening.

 

Here are some mandates from other states that Oregon doesn't have (yet): Chiropractic Care, Marriage Therapy, In Vitro Fertilization, Morbid Obesity Treatment, Smoking Cessation, and so on.

 

Here's the long-term problem: Each mandate, by itself, only raises the cost of your monthly insurance premium 1-10%, but multiply that by 36 mandates and the cumulative effect can be quite costly.

 

In Oregon, our mandates have increased the cost of a monthly insurance premium by about 54%.

 

The House has already passed one new mandate this year and at least one more is on the way.  As insurance rates rise, more and more people become uninsured because they can't afford the premiums.  For that reason, I cannot support more insurance mandates.

 

Making every Oregonian pay for every possible treatment is an extremely expensive way to achieve the goal of universal health care.

 

Instead, we should work to create a system where every Oregonian has their own Health Savings Account.  In this way, each person can direct their health care dollars to the services THEY need.  We are all different and we must each have health insurance that is tailored to our individual needs.

 

The goal of universal access to high quality and affordable health care is absolutely achievable.

 

However, continuing to place well-intentioned mandates on our health insurance coverage only exacerbates the problem of rising costs.