The Oregon Health Authority made the news with an audit showing it wasted $80 million on behavioral health with nothing to show for the money spent.
I wonder how much is $80 million out of OHA’s total budget?
A quick online search took me to the OHA’s 2023-25 budget document. The 4006-page document took a while to download despite my gigabit internet.
Are you sitting down? If you’re driving please pull over to the side of the road now.
The OHA budget for the 2023-25 biennium is $35.8 billion dollars. This is a ten percent increase over the prior budget.
This works out to about $4,100 per year for every man, woman and child in Oregon. $16,400 for a family of four. Not chump change.
The budget funds 5,661 positions which is a lot of people. That doesn’t include most doctors, nurses, and other people who deliver the healthcare services. These people administer many major health programs including Healthier Oregon Program, the Basic Health Program, a temporary Medicaid expansion, Medicaid Waiver Implementation, and maintaining and expanding access to behavioral health services in Oregon.
The last item on the list is the subject of today’s news on the audit results. More on this below.
Enough of the budget. You can read the four-page executive summary on pages 5 to 8. I didn’t get to the other 3,998 pages.
https://www.oregon.gov/oha/Budget/2023-25%20Legislatively%20Adopted%20Budget.pdf
In summary, OHA spends a lot of taxpayer money and has a lot of authority.
House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich called the OHA and Governor Tina Kotek out for the recent audit results and more. Glad to know someone is paying attention to all of this.
OHA Shows Again That It Cannot Get The Job Done
House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich (R-Hood River) issued a statement today after the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) wasted $80 million appropriated for behavioral health by having no results to show for it. An audit determined that OHA was “not able to show the effectiveness of incentive programs, due to a lack of performance metrics and outcome measurements.”
“Oregon is in the midst of an unprecedented behavioral health crisis, and the agency tasked with fixing it has demonstrated yet again that it is wholly ineffective,” said Helfrich. “OHA cannot define what successful behavioral health treatment looks like in part because it is still enabling the drug problem by distributing drug paraphernalia. This is disappointing, though not surprising, for an agency that shows again and again that it cannot be trusted to get the job done.”
The failure to instill any sort of accountability or success metrics while overseeing a large amount of funding is the latest scandal in recent years. Others include:
- Gov. Tina Kotek’s brazen insistence on giving excessive governmental attention and authority to her wife Aimee Kotek-Wilson. This has included most recently a lavish $200,000 one-day summit to promote Kotek-Wilson and using governmental resources to advocate for her personal friends. Six senior staffers have left the Kotek administration as a result.
- The OHA deliberately suppressed a report on the alcohol tax’s ineffectiveness to sway the legislature into taking its preferred, activist, course of action. Worse, recently uncovered emails show federal officials at the CDC were concerned about the report as early as 2022.
- A judge accused an OHA employee of lying and held the OHA in contempt for deliberately withholding a patient’s treatment progress.
- Director Sejal Haithi fired OHA’s long-time equity chief because there were “significant delays” in investigating internal civil rights complaints.
- The entire disaster of the Measure 110 rollout, including tens of millions of dollars distributed to unaccountable NGOs, and most notoriously a $10,000 per call hotline that cannot point to any callers seeking treatment.
- The explosion of fentanyl and opioid deaths in Oregon, especially among young adults and children.
- The OHA’s and Human Services’ long-running inability to house foster children, most recently leading to the death by suicide of a child under their care.
- A report about the testing progress of rape-kits never made it to the legislature because of “bureaucratic breakdowns,” and the subsequent discovery that Oregon has a backlog of close to 1000 test kits with an average wait time of over 240 days.
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It’s hard enough to find and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse at the local level. At the state level, OHA shows how bigger government cannot spend billions without wasting millions.
I guess this is better than the federal government which spends trillions per year and wastes many billions of taxpayer dollars per year.
One of these days ‘We the People’ are going to wake up to all this government spending and decide we can spend our money on our own lives better than the ‘experts’ in Salem and Washington, D.C.
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Richard Emmons is the Publisher and Editor of the Oregon Eagle.