'So Much Evil Had To Happen for this Bill To Pass'

[justaprogressive]

Early last year the Oregon Statehouse passed the strictest prohibition on the corporate control of medicine in the country. It would have restored the ban on the corporate practice of medicine (CPOM) that has been in place in Oregon for decades by closing loopholes that enabled private equity and corporate conglomerates to offer the illusion of physician ownership of health care providers, while maintaining control over how those practices treat patients and deliver services. The idea was that medical professionals, not corporate executives, would be in charge of making medical decisions.

But a frenzied lobbying blitz stalled the bill’s progress in the Senate, where Republicans began to grumble about “unintended consequences.” The bill ultimately died what its most prominent backer described as a “process death” in early March.

Then, the state was hit by a series of relatively earth-shattering “unintended consequences” of corporatized medicine.

First, primary care practices across the nation began to realize they were broke. The week the bill died, a large 11-clinic primary care practice in Corvallis, Oregon held an emergency meeting of its physician-shareholders where all agreed to work without pay so cash could be conserved for staff salaries.

The culprit was a company called Change Healthcare, a massive medical claims processing empire that had just been hacked by a ransomware gang and quietly taken offline by its insurance juggernaut owner, UnitedHealth.

https://prospect.org/health/2025-06-13-united-health-care-oregon-corporate-medicine/