All but two-percent of Oregon's children have health insurance. Most of those who don't are undocumented immigrants. This session, lawmakers will be taking up legislation to make sure all Oregon children are insured.
At the Virginia García health clinic in Beaverton...
"Buenos días..tome asiento.."
They provide a wide range of services, but at a cost:
"Voy a tomarle su presión, (sound of blood pressure cuff)"
Virginia García and other clinics will soon be part of a one-year pilot program called Soy Sano, or I'm Healthy. It will provide free health care to kids who are Oregon residents and don't qualify for the Oregon Health Plan. That mostly means undocumented kids. Kasi Woidyla is with the Virginia García clinic. She says if they can't afford it, kids won't come in for even simple things, like flu shots:
"Flu vaccines are important. They keep kids healthy. If kids stay healthy, parents stay working. If kids get unhealthy, they miss school, parents miss work, they fall further into poverty, and it becomes a cycle."
The clinic's program is temporary and is not statewide. The Oregon Legislature is expected to vote on a bill this session that would permanently provide health insurance for all kids who don't have it--more than 17-thousand of them. If the legislature passes the measure--and it does have bi-partisan support--it could cost 27-million-dollars a year. But Alberto Moreno, Executive Director of the Oregon Latino Health Coalition, says there will also be cost savings:
"The benefit to the state is that we actually provide care in a proactive fashion which means that it's cheaper to provide the care if we do it early than if we wait until the condition has become chronic, until the children show up to the emergency room where we know it's a very expensive way to provide care."
Providing health insurance for kids has been a top Latino community priority for years. Two years ago, after Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to deny driver's licenses to unauthorized immigrants, legislators did not even want to give hearings to bills that would help immigrants. Pacific University Political Science Professor Jim Moore says things are different now:
"The main thing that has changed has been the presidential campaign 2016 and the election of Donald Trump."
Moore says for some lawmakers, this kind of legislation is a message to Trump:
"What this presidential campaign did is it changed immigration and the way we talk about it from being not just protecting our jobs and then are immigrants breaking the law to immigrants as people, because people in the campaign, including Trump himself, took off after immigrants as people."
If the health insurance bill fails, it probably won't be due to politics, but due to a shortage of funds. Oregon is facing a budget shortfall of nearly two billion dollars for the next biennium.