Oregon

one of the United States

• contains Portland
  • a hyper-crunchy "city" with a weird history of Racism

Healthcare Reform efforts

The Oregon Health Plan was conceived and realized in 1993 by emergency room doctor (and future Oregon governor) John Kitzhaber, then a state senator,[1] and Dr. Ralph Crawshaw, a Portland activist.[2] It was intended to make health care more available to the working poor, while rationing benefits.[1] During the 1990s, Oregon was considered a national leader in health care reform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Health_Plan

• The Oregon Health Plan became the focus of national scrutiny in 2003, after deep budget cuts led to 100,000 people in mental health and/or substance abuse treatment losing prescription coverage under the program.[18]
• During 2008 and 2009, the Oregon Health Plan stirred up controversy when enforcing 1994 guidelines[19] to only cover comfort care, and not to cover cancer treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy for patients with less than a 5% chance of survival over five years.

The Oregon health insurance experiment (sometimes abbreviated OHIE)[1] was a research study looking at the effects of the 2008 Medicaid expansion in the US state of Oregon, which occurred based on lottery drawings from a waiting list and thus offered an opportunity to conduct a randomized experiment by comparing a control group of lottery losers to a treatment group of winners, who were eligible to apply for enrollment in the Medicaid expansion program after previously being uninsured... Commentators in publications such as Forbes and RealClearPolitics cited the study as evidence that the Medicaid program fails its central cause of assisting the American poor,[4][5] but other commentators in publications such as The New Republic and the Daily Kos stated that the evidence of improved financial security and mental health provided a significant social benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment

also a Syncopated Music band

Oregon is an American jazz and World Music group, originally formed in 1971 by Ralph Towner (guitar, piano, synthesizer, trumpet), Paul McCandless (woodwind instruments), Glen Moore (double bass, violin, piano), and Collin Walcott (percussion, sitar, tabla). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_(band)