PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Though it may seem a bit perverse, I ask the question in the headline because of what I have seen over more than 40 years dealing with the Oregon Legislature.

The fact is that, when legislators don’t want to recognize a state law, they don’t. They shove it aside and move on.

Could they be charged with breaking the law? Probably.

But, so far, with respect to the examples I cite below, no one has made such a charge.

And, if someone would proceed to do so, the initiative might not succeed because legislators could wiggle out of responsibility. Further, a good attorney probably could argue that the words in the various laws are not strong enough to enforce.

Well, I say, then scrap the laws and live with the consequence of doing so if there are, in fact, consequences.

Here are three examples of skirting the spirit, if not the letter, of Oregon laws.

FUNDING FOR OREGON PUBLIC BROADCASTING (OPB)

Oregon’s public broadcasting enterprise is recognized as one of the best in the country. In the spirit of full disclosure, OPB was one of my favorite lobby clients and it remains on my firm’s client roster today. So, call me biased.

ORS 354.410 says this: “The state recognizes a continuing obligation to contribute to the support of the not-for-profit organization known as Oregon Public Broadcasting. The state recognizes that a continuing financial partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting, the citizens of Oregon and the Corporation for Oregon Public Broadcasting is essential to the preservation of statewide access to the public broadcasting service, statewide educational and public affairs programming services and broadcast services for the disabled.”

Well, guess what? This has been only a symbolic statement, not a law with any clout. To be fair, the State of Oregon did make available $3 million in lottery-backed bonding authority at my request several years ago to extend OPB’s radio and television signals to rural Oregon to make sure such areas didn’t go dark – and what’s particularly interesting is that OPB is often a treasured resource East of the Cascades.

My plea was buttressed by that of OPB’s very credible CEO, Steve Bass, who has carved out a positive reputation since he arrived here more than 10 years ago.

But that $3 million has been the extent of state financial support.

So, in the face of this law, the Legislature mostly ignored it.

HEALTH INSURANCE MANDATES

There is a state law that sets up how proposed new health insurance mandates are to be considered in the Legislature.

It sounds better than it works.

The law is ORS 171.875 that requires every proposed legislative measure containing health insurance coverage mandates to be accompanied by a report that assesses both the social and financial effects of the coverage.

Areas that must be addressed in this report include the following:

• The extent to which treatment or service will be used in Oregon;
• The extent of coverage already available in Oregon;
• The proportion of Oregonians who already have such coverage;
• The extent to which lack of coverage results in financial hardship in Oregon;
• Evidence of medical need in Oregon for the proposed treatment or services; and
• The financial effect of the proposed measure, including the increase/decrease of costs of treatment, the extent to which coverage will increase treatment, the extent to which mandated treatment is expected to be a substitute for more expensive treatment, the impact on administrative expenses of the insurer and premiums/administrative expenses of policyholders and the overall impact on total cost of health care.

This is a legal requirement that seldom, if ever, was met during my tenure as a health insurance lobbyist. True, I was on the side of the insurance companies, not the pro-mandate forces.

But, still, a law is a law and should prompt compliance.

Many of the mandates might have made sense and the fact is that insurers, not being stupid all the time, already covered some of the services to be mandated. One example was mandated coverage for contraceptives.

Insurers uniformly included the coverage, but women’s advocacy interests didn’t care about that reality. They just wanted to hang a new pelt on the wall – and, to do so, they did not comply with the law outlined above…they just found the votes.

SENATE BILL 964, FOSTER CARE CONTRACTING PAY-FOR-PERFORMANCE

When I represented ChristieCare, a predecessor to Youth Villages in providing services to children and youth, including in foster care, one of our major achievements was passing a bill to install a “pay-for-performance” approach in private sector contracts to reduce the state foster care caseload.

A key line in the proposed law, Senate Bill 964, was this: “Client-focused outcome measures mean objective, observable measures of outcomes for services provided to a child and a child’s family…including but not limited to measures relating to permanency.”

This became ORS 418.580 and the jury is still out on whether state agencies – especially the Department of Human Services (DHS) – have complied with this statutory requirement. The only “evidence” I can find so far is that DHS has submitted written reports to the legislature suggesting that it is complying, though the content of some of the reports I have read don’t include verification of the “pay-for-performance.” And that requirement, at least in theory, should mean that some contractors would lose their deals because of inadequate results.

And that’s all the more reason to be concerned because the foster care caseload in Oregon is intolerably high as many children in the system are not transferred out quickly and safely enough into permanent placements.

As I wrote earlier, no one is likely to accuse the legislative law-breakers of breaking laws they wrote. But, if the laws are on the books, one of two things should occur: Either (1) the law should be followed, or (2) the law should be repealed.

I suppose a third option is for legislators simply to do what they do now, which is to ignore laws they don’t like.