Panel of local leaders to take your questions on health care March 1

Curtis Blankinship: On March 1, 2025, there’s going to be a second Citywide Health Care Forum and Health Fair sponsored by the Eugene Health Care Coalition at the Willamette Christian Center on 2500 W. 18th Ave.

I talked to Tom Peck, the vice chair of the Eugene Health Care Coalition, about this very important meeting that is going to feature people like Sen. James Manning and Rep. Lisa Fragala.

[00:00:33] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): My name is Tom Peck. I am the vice chair of the Friendly Area Neighborhood and I’m also on the steering committee of the Eugene Health Care Coalition. The Eugene Health Care Coalition is promoting the upcoming Citywide Health Care Forum on Saturday, March 1.

[00:00:55] I’d like to talk a little bit about what we are planning and what we hope to accomplish at this forum.

[00:01:02] Just a little bit about us: The Eugene Health Care Coalition is a broad coalition of volunteers from unions, neighborhood organizations, faith-based organizations, and our mission is to educate and activate the community to preserve the quality and access of our health care, and really to support the good elected officials who are putting forth legislation to protect it as well.

[00:01:37] We have some great speakers. They are the top elected officials who are leading health care reform, and they include Sen. James Manning, who is very much behind health care for all; (Rep.) Lisa Fragala, who is a co-signer with (Rep.) Nancy Nathanson, her bill on innovative health care for Lane County; we’ll have Eve Gray, who is the director of Lane County Health and Human Services;

[00:02:16] (Eugene Springfield) Fire Chief (Mike) Caven, there’s major reform underway in the fire department and EMS; Amy Fellows, who is an Oregon Governance Board member; Matt Calzia, who is an RN working at a local hospital who’s going to talk about working conditions and how the push for, by their corporations by, you know, the hospitals to push nurses to maximize their output, which creates somewhat dangerous health care.

[00:02:56] And the last speaker is Valdez Bravo. He’s the president of Health Care for All Oregon. So it’s a really dynamic group of people. There will be time for questions and answers after their presentations.

[00:03:14] So, preceding the forum, starting at 11 a.m. is an NAACP Health Care Fair, so all of the smaller community health care organizations will be presenting—HIV Alliance and people like that will be there before—and then the actual forum starts at 2 p.m.

[00:03:41] So what I say is, some people ask: ‘Why would I want to go to a health care forum on a beautiful Saturday?’

[00:03:51] Well, I can tell you that the access to quality health care is in serious trouble. The intention of this forum is to educate and activate our community and help protect our health care And support elected officials who are doing very hard work to draft legislations to as well protect our health care, and I’ll talk about that a little more.

[00:04:22] Some of the challenges that we faced last year was the closure of the University District Emergency Room and behavioral health. They served 100 patients a day in South and West Eugene. What people don’t realize is that if you are having a life-threatening medical emergency, your travel time has gone from my house about a little over a minute to eight minutes to get to RiverBend, which is in Springfield.

[00:05:03] So Eugene no longer has a hospital. If there’s an earthquake, we will be stranded because most of the bridges will probably collapse, if it’s a Cascadian subduction-scale earthquake, and we will be without any emergency care on this side of the river.

[00:05:27] Incidentally, before the closure of the University District hospital, it was just disclosed that PeaceHealth has purchased ZOOM+Care and they are investing millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, in this venture, while they were closing a critical emergency room to our community.

[00:05:58] The other thing that happened last year and preceding years was the debacle at the Oregon Medical Group, where Optum Oregon, it’s a subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group, we’ve all heard of that, the largest health care organization or company in the U.S. is completely profit-driven and with their profit-driven business plan, after taking over Oregon Medical Group, over 30 physicians said we can’t practice good medicine if we’re only allowed a few minutes with each patient, we have quotas. So, 30 physicians left that practice.

[00:06:50] They basically left. That left literally thousands of patients without a primary care physician. And that is critical. You have to have a primary care physician to seek any other further care. That’s your first stop.

[00:07:08] So that problem of not having enough primary care physicians still exists today. It’s very difficult to get in to a physician and it takes months to get an appointment. And the other thing that happened is PacificSource pulled their funding from White Bird. It was to the tune of $3.4 million. That happened last December, and White Bird serves a huge community of unhoused and uninsured people, and they are very challenged to maintain those services.

[00:07:50] The other challenge that we’re facing is the corporatization of our health care. Large health care corporations and private equity firms are very focused on health care and they’re moving into Oregon at a very rapid pace.

[00:08:11] What this means is the corporate executives are now making many decisions about our health care instead of the physicians. They’re decreasing the amount of time physicians have with patients. They are cutting auxiliary staff and putting too much pressure on physicians. They’re not feeling they didn’t feel like they could deliver quality care.

[00:08:38] And the other part is it’s increasing competition, so smaller clinics and medical facilities have to compete with these big corporations and it’s putting them out of business. There are other challenges to our health care coming up, especially with the new administration. Medicaid, there’s a lot of talk and people are understanding that Medicaid is going to be dramatically cut. It was cut, and Trump shut down the Medicaid website.

[00:09:23] And fortunately, Sen. Ron Wyden pushed back with a lot of other elected officials, and they restored it. But the problem is 1.4 million Oregonians rely on Medicaid who are on the Oregon Health Plan. If it’s cut, they are going to be challenged for their health care.

[00:09:48] The other challenge is the Biden order for Prescription Drug Price Reduction Plan has been rescinded. The Affordable Care Act is being rolled back. Dr. Oz, who is heavily invested in health care and Big Pharma, is the nominee to lead the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.

[00:10:17] This is a huge conflict of interest. He stands to make millions by making Medicare Advantage Plan the default Medicare plan, which is now controlled by large corporations, like UnitedHealthcare.

[00:10:37] The other challenge is: Robert Kennedy is the secretary of the federal Health and Human Services. He has a long history of vaccine denial. He has sued the National Institute for Health for their distribution of the COVID vaccine, which has saved millions of people.

[00:11:01] He has stated that there is no vaccine that is safe and effective. He promoted the lie that the MMR vaccine caused autism, which has been proven to be untrue. And he’s really gone around the world, went to Samoa and told them they shouldn’t be using the measles vaccine. Fortunately, they were smart enough to understand that he was just an anti-vaxxer.

[00:11:36] But about 80 children died because they slowed down their distribution of the measles vaccine. But finally, they said, ‘This is crazy,’ and they stopped it. And the last thing that has happened just recently is that the U.S. has pulled out of the World Health Organization. Their role is to monitor disease around the world, and if there is a disease outbreak that we aren’t completely aware of it, but if we pull out, if there is a big pandemic in another part of the world, we will not know about it.

[00:12:17] The state of Oregon / county health are making provisions to protect Oregonians. Sejal Hathi, who is the director of the Oregon Health Authority, pledged that anybody in the Oregon Health Plan will be covered by state funding if it’s cut. She’s assembling an incident command. If there is any health care emergencies, they will bring it to light and figure out a response. She has pledged to protect transgender youth. She is extending health care coverage to undocumented residents.

[00:13:05] And there are several other initiatives. She’s put together a trusted messaging network that will protect against misinformation that may come out about our health care. So this forum is an attempt to get people together, to organize and to activate people. It is vitally important for all of our community to become informed and activated to support our health care and our elected officials who are leading this effort.

[00:13:44] Curtis Blankinship: All right, and you talked about there’s little, less and less competition. So first of all, assuming that we have a privatized system, I’m not talking about whether privatized or public is better than the other. But let’s say they continue on with a privatized system and then we only have one corporation that we all have to go to. What’s gonna happen there? What if only one corporation, there’s only one game in town for us to get health care for. What will happen to the quality of our health care then, do you think?

[00:14:18] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): Well, I’m a patient of the Lane County Health Department. I get great care from them. I had a medical emergency the next day. I got three phone calls. How are you doing? Do you need help? Do you need food? Are you in a safe place? All those things. I got no calls from the actual cardiologist or that hospital. Hospitals, pretty much all of them now, are profit-driven. That is their bottom line. It is not high quality health care. It is an example of shutting down the University District Hospital, a vital hospital to our community, to divert funds, to expand into a new market.

[00:15:19] So, and corporate executives are making decisions, critical decisions, including denial of procedures for our health care, and it needs to be completely driven by physicians.

[00:15:48] There is legislation underway to stop the corporatization and require that health care facilities are run by physicians and not corporate executives who are looking at profit margins.

[00:16:05] Curtis Blankinship: But what I’m getting at is the profit motive, though, there’s a third, your money is going to a third area, your money isn’t going just to your health care, it’s going to shareholders and administrators to pay them in addition to. So the money I put into the health care doesn’t just go for my health care with the profit motive.

[00:16:25] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): Exactly. For an example, UnitedHealth Group in 2023 had a net profit a 36%, of $22.4 billion. That’s sheer profit, that they’re able to buy more facilities.

[00:16:52] They make huge profit by denying health care, delaying health care, and pushing out small practices.

Curtis Blankinship: They don’t use the money to buy necessarily to buy more facility or if they do buy more facilities it’s to again make profit. But that profit goes to the shareholders, just goes into their bank account. It doesn’t go to more facilities or more health care.

Tom Peck: Exactly. They have stockholders and and executives who are expecting the corporation to have a healthy return and they fulfill that, that’s their primary job.

[00:17:39] Curtis Blankinship: Right, but so their argument though is that this competition creates a higher quality health care. So, but like you’re saying, eventually the competition, if they keep competing with one another, the ultimate result of that will be that there will only be one corporation to go to there. So their whole system to me doesn’t add up. Whether you believe in capitalism or not, you shouldn’t be competing for better services. They should just always have better services or the best quality that you can get. So you know what I mean? So what is going to happen if we only have one corporation that we buy all our health care for? What will happen to the quality then?

[00:18:30] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): If they’re that big, they can break unions. They can degrade the quality of health care. Nurses will tell you that the working conditions are unbearable in many places and they quit. And they say, ‘Well, there’s not enough nurses.’ There’s not enough nurses and doctors because they’re sick of working for corporate medicine, and they want to deliver good health care.

There are awesome nurses and doctors out there but they’re giving up on the industry because it is so corporatized; 80% of doctors now work for a corporation. It wasn’t that long ago when 80% of doctors had their own private practice. They worked in hospitals, they didn’t work for the hospital. But the health care industry is monopolizing control and that leads to poor health care.

[00:19:33] Health care should be led by community health and human services, not by profit-driven corporations.

Curtis Blankinship: But at least we can vote out someone if they’re not doing a good job. We have the ability to vote them out, whereas we don’t really have the ability to vote out the head of a corporation.

[00:19:58] Tom Peck: Right. I mean, you have some controls over a community. There are many controls over the county and state health and human services. There really is not much control, especially when they wield so much power that they can really tell local officials what they’re going to do. And if they don’t like it, they’ll just close shop. And so they have too much control now, and it needs to be more balanced.

[00:20:33] And really, what we need is government-controlled health care for all, where the communities deliver that health care, and not for-profit corporations raking off a big part of our monthly costs.

[00:20:55] Curtis Blankinship: What happened to the audit that they were going to do of the University Hospital shutdown? What happened to that?

[00:21:05] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): I don’t know of any audit that’s come out. There’s really, I think, a lot of public officials did not see any opportunity to fight back. It’s really up to the community and that’s what our Eugene Health Care Coalition is all about: We’re the community and we’re pushing back. There are some great public officials, elected officials. We’re doing good work. We need to put our shoulder behind them and support them, and push them to even do better work.

[00:21:48] Curtis Blankinship: What’s going to happen if that doesn’t work? What will people do, do you think, if that doesn’t work?

[00:21:53] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): If we don’t succeed, we have big problems. Our health care is just going to be degraded. Medicaid is going to be gone. The Affordable Care Act will be diminished. The cabinet that Trump has picked with Dr. Oz and Robert Kennedy are just going to turn it into a profit-making venture. They will bring in a whole new era of poor health care.

[00:22:32] Curtis Blankinship: They’re saying that the state will be able to pay for this. You know, San Diego just reported a $250 million budget deficit and what is the overall cause of this? You know, why are our federal dollars, where do our federal dollars go instead of health of health care? Or, what do you think caused this?

Tom Peck: We are seeing increasingly the federal government not reimbursing and not paying for state and local initiatives the way it used to be. And we have, I mean, personally, I think we have almost a $1 trillion per year budget for military. That should be going towards our community, not for setting up hundreds of military bases around the world.

[00:23:33] Curtis Blankinship: This is austerity programs, is what people don’t seem to realize, is that we really should be pushing the federal government, in my opinion, to be to push to get this money spent to the states. 

[00:23:47] Tom Peck (Eugene Health Care Coalition): Well, unless the communities wake up and get involved to protecting their rights, their health care rights, their civil rights, we are going to see a very dark period in this country and I’m very concerned.

[00:24:12] Curtis Blankinship: All right, Tom Peck of the Eugene Health Care Coalition with their event on March 1. They’re having the second Citywide Health Care Forum and Health Fair Saturday March 1, 2025; the health fair from 11 to 2 and the health care forum from 2 to 4 at the Willamette Christian Center, 2500 W. 18th Ave., Eugene. Willamette Christian Center, 2500 W. 18th Ave., Eugene, on March 1, 11 to 4 p .m. Hope you can show up for that. For more information, go to the EugeneHealthcareCoalition.org website.

[00:25:00] For KEPW News, I’m Curtis Blankinship.