- No healthcare? You can always use potatoes to heal your wounds.
Today, February 1st, is the monthly lottery drawing for low-income Oregonians to get onto the Oregon Health Plan. If you’re not rich, not pregnant and between the ages of 19 and 64, you could qualify to receive free or relatively cheap healthcare from the state (socialism!!1!!1). However, there are far too many people who qualify for state healthcare than the state’s current health plan can afford to allow in. So every month the state stages a sort of morbid lottery, letting some of the people on the Oregon Health Plan “reservation list” into the actual program. This is the most fair and equitable system our state could come up with, but the sad fact is that many Oregonians’ physical and financial futures rely entirely on the luck of a draw. Get on the lottery list here.
The other depressing fact is that this lottery system is a big step forward for Oregon. The demand for cheap healthcare was so overwhelming that the state completely closed its health plan waitlist from 2004 until November 2009. February’s lottery, only the fourth in six years, is a grim reminder how screwed up our social services are despite recent political progress.
Retarded. But thank God we have a tram!!!!!
Feh.
Thanks for the tip… any idea if OHP includes a dental or vision plan?
If you love state run health care now, just wait until the federal bureaucracy is in charge of it.
@D: Is having state or federally controlled health-care a worse alternative than having no health care? [COMMENT EDITED: UNNECESSARILY ABUSIVE LANGUAGE.]
Call me all the names you want. Everyone has health care. Not everyone has health insurance.
Yeah, let’s limit the name calling, please. It’s unnecessary when one is making a valid point.
@D and we pay for their “health care” one way or another. We *could* spend the money on preventative care by just giving everyone health insurance but instead some would rather spend the money on when people go to the emergency room and can’t pay for it so the costs are exponentially higher higher that way.
I think there’s a Mercury staffer who is *very* aware of real socialized medicine, not it being used as a club by Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et al. to scare people away from reform of “give us lots of money and maybe we’ll pay your doctor” health care.
Without being abusive, the lottery participants have a chance at getting health coverage, which is a lot better than a certainty of having no coverage.
Sarah- OHP was in much better shape prior to 2004 and I believe had open enrollment & was one of the better plans in the country-if I recall correctly-but the budget crisis forced massive chnages, including, I believe, cutting of dental services.
D – I’m not sure you are complaining about OHP services reflecting poorly on federal services, since they mimic federal Medicaid serviices (which are now, since OHP standard was cut, better than OHP standard). Oregon Health Plan is just the Oregon name for medicaid services run under federal Medicaid guidelines
@D STFU Randtard. I actually lived in a country with socialized health care for 7 years. Was it the awesome of the awesome? No. Did it keep people alive? Certainly did. And within a year and a half of being back did Kaiser accidentally term my policy leaving me without healthcare? Certainly did. Do I have any recourse? NO.
“However, there are far too many people who qualify for state healthcare than the state’s current health plan can afford to allow in. So every month the state stages a sort of morbid lottery,”
socialism!!1!!1
I, too, lived in a country with socialized healthcare. I supervised one employee who was given vicoden to treat the pain for her fibroid cysts because she couldn’t get surgery until she hit the magic number on the waiting list, likely six months to a year out. Sounds kind of like a lottery to me.
Ain’t no such thing as “Socialized” healthcare. We pay for it either way.
Either we all pay pennies per head thru taxes to have single-payer universal care with preventative medicine.
Or we allow our uncovered fellow Americans to get sicker and sicker until they’re wheeled into an Emergency Room where they become a burden on the system and generate unpaid million(+) dollar bills which insurance companies pass along to you and me through our co-payments.
We pay for it either way. But we save more money with universal care.
And you honestly think private companies are any better than government? For real? Wow. Have you been outside lately?
The only difference is that, unlike private companies, we can fire our government public servants when they do a bad job.