NO PUBLIC OVERSIGHT for Umpqua Health Alliance, CCO for Douglas County

Representative Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, as Chair of the House Health Committee, has put forth HB-2960, a bill that would ensure greater public scrutiny of coordinated care organizations.

According to a post online yesterday by Christopher David Gray, a reporter at The Lund Report,  "... in Roseburg, Umpqua Health Alliance’s meetings are so secretive, even its community advisory council — a body created by most CCOs as a vehicle for public outreach — holds private meetings without public oversight."

At a town hall meeting held 29 March at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg Oregon, conservative Republican Representative Tim Freeman admitted that even his request for the list of members of the Community Advisory Council (CAC) for our local CCO, the Umpqua Health Alliance, had been denied. Yet, Freeman testified in Salem on Monday 15 April he is opposed to HB 2960, making CCOs subject to public meetings law.

“There’s nothing that keeps CCOs from having open meetings,” said Freeman, who believes different communities should be able to create their own standards of transparency. Really? The folks running our local CCO are operating on the "standard of transparency" of SECRECY (meaning NO public transparency.) 

This is truly a nightmare situation for those of us living in Douglas County, where DCIPA, a private, for-profit doctors group, operates as a monopoly.  Deemed by the state to be exempt from anti-trust laws, DCIPA under the leadership of Dr. Robert Dannenhoffer, has been controlling the delivery of health care services, serving fewer and fewer patients while receiving millions of dollars of public funds through the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Now, with the formation of Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) according to Gray, 

"Billions of Medicaid dollars will be delegated to Oregon’s 15 coordinated care organizations, which are set up locally to deliver care within the Oregon Health Plan. They receive a global budget that must meet strict cost controls or forfeit federal money.

If successful, the quasi-public, quasi-private CCOs might be tasked with delivering healthcare for many more Oregonians in the future beyond those on the Oregon Health Plan including public employees, school teachers and administrators and people who work in the private sector."

The health and even the lives of our neighbors are at stake in the struggle to force public accountability of CCOs. Please take action now to make things right and contact Rep. Mitch Greenlick, the other members of the House Health Committee, your personal legislative representatives, and your friends and family and urge them to support HB-2960, calling for public scrutiny of CCOs. 


Click here to read The Lund Report article by Christopher David Gray.