Lane County Health & Human Services building in Eugene, Oregon. They promote and protect long-term health and the well being of individuals and families in the community.

Countries that spend more on healthcare tend to have a higher life expectancy — a reasonable assumption. However, something doesn’t quite add up within the United States.

Healthcare spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be remarkably higher in the U.S. than in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries — with the U.S. spending almost four times as much on healthcare as families in South Korea and New Zealand.

However, the U.S. life expectancy at birth is almost three years lower than the OECD average, with the average life expectancy for minorities being lower, and it has one of the highest rates for maternal and infant deaths, and the number of avoidable deaths has also been rising.

This is the only OECD country without a guaranteed healthcare plan, and not only is this costing more and more each year, but it’s also proving to provide subpar healthcare. But this could change in the near future, at least in Oregon.

Between 2019 and 2022, a joint task force on universal health care worked to design a publicly funded, single-payer healthcare system — they conducted significant research and drew on extensive public input. When the report was completed, the findings showed that a single payer system is possible, would provide substantially better care to people, and would save almost one billion dollars.

Currently, the Universal Health Plan Governance Board is designing a detailed plan to recommend to the Oregon legislature, which will be submitted in 2026. Moving forward, the plan can be passed through the legislative branch or given directly to the Oregon voters in a ballot initiative.

In a conversation with Hannah Bishop and Lou Sinniger from Healthcare for All Lane County, they mentioned why they are drawn to organize at the Lane County chapter.

“It’s not partisan in a way that many other things are,” Bishop said. “I feel like healthcare is one thing that everyone agrees on, and that our current system is really broken.

Sinniger is a retired labor organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and touched on the importance of universalized healthcare during labor negotiations; since healthcare is a private expense for the employers, other benefits are often cut. “I watched my own caucus bargaining unit give up wages and rights just to maintain the health insurance they needed for themselves and their families, and it brought tears to my eyes,” Sinniger said.

“Doctors are reimbursed more by private insurance than by Medicare or Medicaid holders. For the same service, a doctor gets reimbursed one dollar by private insurance, 75 cents for Medicare and 50 cents for Medicaid,” Bishop said.

The current healthcare system also incentivises private insurance through direct reimbursement to doctors, creating an inequitable system that determines the quality of healthcare you receive based on your ability to pay. “This means that there’s this unfortunate side effect of potentially wanting to help people with private insurance more than people with medicare or medicaid, and I don’t think that any doctor actually wants that,” Bishop said.

The U.S. is also paying five times more in health care administrative costs, money that is not even used for healthcare. By having a universal single-payer healthcare system, the current process would be drastically simplified, minimizing overall costs.

“People have this opportunity to design something for themselves,” Bishop said. “We have the opportunity to design a healthcare system that will serve us — it won’t serve CEOs, it won’t serve profits, it won’t serve stockholders — it will serve the people who actually need care, and it will serve the doctors and nurses who are providing that care.”