Opinion: Unpacking Oregon’s Ballot Measure 111

Ballot Measure 111 – Amends the Oregon Constitution to obligate the state to provide Oregon residents, “access to cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care as a fundamental right.”

The whole essence of the measure is in these three relevant clauses:

• cost-effective, 
• clinically appropriate and 
• affordable.

How can the state fulfill this fundamental human-right? How will this work?

First, the state will need to monopolize service providers, medical professionals, and any associated or necessary products, technologies or devices.  This is why this “essential human right” bans employer and private insurance plans. It has to eliminate leakage, or competition, so that the state can enjoy full monopoly power. This is accomplished by outlawing any other alternative options.
The notion that someone’s right to healthcare removes another person’s right to purchase healthcare highlights the ideological difference between “negative rights” and “positive rights.”  Our Bill of Rights contains negative rights, they naturally belong to everyone, and government cannot infringe or make any laws to hamper those rights. Positive rights, however, make demands on other people – you are forbidden from purchasing private insurance, but you are obligated to pay for the insurance of others.

Second, the state will need to create a new distribution model to make these goods and services “affordable.” 

How is affordability measured? Since no one will ever directly pay for medical services, how will appropriate and affordable costs be determined? Suppose we have two people of the same age, in the same income tier and income tax bracket, meaning they will both incur the same “healthcare bill” within their new income tax schedule –  All is fair. 

Now, one person breaks his arm, gets it set and casted. While the other person has two knee-replacements, and four heart-valve replacements. Obviously, the person with the broken arm got stiffed.

This also begs the question; how will the various tax brackets get created? Who will determine which workers are essential (and get their medicine faster) and which are non-essential? Where will tax plans be hatched, and which persons will be trapped in the dragnet created to capture the needed resources for re-distribution?

Since this plan will eliminate discernment and cost discretion in the consumers’ minds, the state will eventually face shortages. In turn, the state will need to ration goods and services by implementing some perverse approval gauntlet that will determine what goods or services might be “clinically appropriate,” given one’s age, income, health status, etc.

This ballot measure is one leg of a trap baited with a misplaced and inauthentic (or naïve) hope that the created bureaucracy will be transparent, above board and untainted. However, this has never been true and will always haunt a state’s diligent citizens.

The overall question is, “How will it be accomplished? Can the state magically provide therapies, surgeries, behavioral health services and ace bandages? If so, where would these things come from? How will those services get paid for? 

Health care socialism is the most fiscally explosive entitlement program ever conceived  and is destined to failure because:

1. It corrodes individual responsibility, choice and personal financial accountability.
2. It ignores the ultimate drivers of the demand for medical care such as personal fitness, nutrition habits and healthy living practices.
3. It supplants an ill-defined “collective” sense of Public Health officialdom as markers for individual health, like mass inoculations for the common flu with the newest mRNA EUA gene therapies.
4. It promotes “medical service data mining operators” to promote and sell tangential service opportunities based upon patient ICD-10 code history even though new procedures or services may be unnecessary.
5. It creates massive opportunities for ICD-10 coding fraud. (Fraud is a major component of runaway costs.)
6. It will destroy market discipline on the supplier-side of the equation because universal reimbursement will be ensured.

All of us have made mistakes and many of us have given weight to ideas that may seem okay at first but later turn out to be really bad ideas. Measure 111 doesn’t fall into this category because on its face, Measure 111, is far worse. 

It is built on the most hollow but soothing political rhetoric which proposes that everything will be just fine after we outlaw employer-provided health plans across the entire state and implement a brand new multi-billion-dollar income tax scheme to collect the needed revenue.

Single-payer health care has always been an integral part of the collectivist mindset, but here we have a headlong dive into the statist pit of ultimate tyranny. Control a person’s private health and you can control that person’s life. 
 Vote NO on Measure 111!

Keep reading for further thoughts below…

History tells us that everyone in Oregon already has first-hand experience with the tragedy of centrally planned, managed and and executed healthcare.

From the end of 2019 to now, our lives and futures were put into the hands of “public health professionals” because they “knew” the science. Those same people are now publishing (for profit) the details of their dishonest efforts at cajoling the public and the former and current administrations into unwise and grossly over-priced healthcare solutions that were unneeded and did not work.

The public knew, within weeks of publication, that the Imperial College London projection models for possible COVID deaths produced outlandishly over-stated estimates. We knew there was no science behind the 6-foot social distancing protocol and Dr. Birx, in her recent best-seller, admitted that this was completely made up. We knew, by reading the package label for facemasks, that masks should not be used for viral protection – the corona virus was known to be too small to be filtered out. We knew that having plexiglass installed in haphazard fashion across the land was silly.

It was just as silly as having big-box employees washing shopping cart handles and cleaning counters after our products were bagged into the dirty old knapsack. We also knew, after seeing just one video of Dr. Karry Mullis that the rt-PCR test was never meant for diagnostic purposes. Mullis, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the PCR test, described for the scientific community that the PCR should only be used for lab research.

Additionally, for the past 50 years scientists all over the world were aware of Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and quercetin which were commonly dispensed without any prescriptions. These products had been successfully used millions of times for off-label purposes and early results with Sars-COV-2 showed great promise, especially when combined with assorted vitamins, zinc and other necessary cofactors.

Lastly, each of us had a nagging feeling that the scrolling asymptomatic numbers crawling across the nightly-news screen was unfathomable and was a result of the elites requiring the faulty PCR test to generate big numbers. This was an entirely new feature for keeping people scared, at home, and ensuring they observed the mandatory lockdowns between visits to big-box stores, grocers, pot-shops and state-run liquor stores.

We have seen the most ambitious but risk averse politicians, like Oregon’s Governor, Kate Brown (D), the Speaker of the Oregon’s House chamber, Tina Kotek (D), the Oregon Senate President, Peter Courtney (D), and Oregon’s OHA director, Patrick Allen, each turn their back on their constituents, breach their fiduciary duty, and violate our public trust. 

All of this, while supposedly running an enormously beneficent service organization committed to, “Ensuring all people and communities can achieve optimum physical, mental, and social well-being through partnerships, prevention, and access to quality, affordable health care.”

This menagerie of pleasant sound bites in OHA’s mission statement is remarkably similar to Measure 111. The socialist goal sounds too good to be true because it is. It is impossible even after levying a new tax on everyone while preventing leakage by outlawing competition from alternative private or employer-provided healthcare options. 

It turns out there is no interest in solving problems but only interest in amassing great power. The statists have utterly abandoned all common-sense and reason with this latest sales-pitch mollycoddled and coolly couched within confusing caveats.