Christopher David Gray

The new marquee drug Sovaldi has been a boon for its manufacturer, provoking big concerns among coordinated care organizations. But competition should soon eliminate its monopoly and help the healthcare system pay for this promising new cure for a deadly disease.

A lynchpin to Gov. John Kitzhaber’s transformation talk has been the community health worker, who can work at the ground level with high-need Medicaid patients and help them access and maintain their proper level of care. The state budgeted $675,000 to train these essential workers, but the groups that have already been doing much of the work of getting people trained for these new positions, such as the Urban League, have not seen a dime of that money.

A new report from the Oral Health Funders Collaborative, including the Northwest Health Foundation, drilled down on a key driver of emergency department visits -- lack of access to a good dentist. The analysis found people without health insurance were eight times more likely than people with private insurance to head for the emergency room for a toothache or other dental ailment.

A recent land deal for St. Charles Medical Center and a group of Bend physicians may have been sweeter than first reported. Not only did their investment group, Cascade Property Holdings, sell the land for the new Oregon State University campus at a $3 million profit -- they sold the 10-acre parcel for 22 percent more than the appraised value.

Gov. John Kitzhaber holds firm in his opinion that Cover Oregon needs no legislative approval or special session to scrap its portal for the federal exchange, despite an opinion from legislative counsel that says otherwise.

A group of autism advocates have sued the Public Employees Benefit Board, arguing that their self-insured health plan has no right to deny needed treatment for children simply because they have autism. The class-action lawsuit in Marion County Circuit Court comes despite PEBB’s agreement to begin covering applied behavior analysis in January 2015, a position it has voluntarily taken.

For people with modest incomes who haven’t been fortunate enough to receive employer-supported insurance, the Affordable Care Act has been something of a godsend, allowing them to purchase health insurance for the first time without breaking the bank. Nearly 300,000 people in Oregon are newly enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan, and many more had the chance to buy subsidized health insurance on Cover Oregon for a fraction of the sticker price.

The former chief administrator for St. Charles Health System, Kirk Schueler, served on the site selection committee and university board that approved the purchase, but says he recused himself from any decision regarding the sale of the property, which sits next to two abandoned industrial sites on the west side of Bend.

The Cover Oregon rollout has been notoriously plagued by a terrible website, but the state has consistently ranked in the middle of the pack compared to other states, and reported 63,000 private enrollments on April 10. One key reason for this? Community partners, who have taken a more grassroots approach to getting people enrolled. These groups, along with insurance agents, can sit with a consumer face-to-face and guide them through the application process. Agents have been given the ability to enroll people immediately in a subsidized health plan, without waiting for Cover Oregon to take days to process the application.

Rob Nosse has witnessed first-hand the uplift in the healthcare system over the past decade, observing Oregon’s Medicaid healthcare transformation and now the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.