January 2025 - Page 4

By BEN BOTKIN/Oregon Capital Chronicle Oregon hospitals are operating at a loss or often with thin profit margins, with patients boarding in emergency rooms and rural facilities forced to consider closing maternity wards. The space between net patient revenues and operating costs continues to rise, putting more than half of Oregon’s hospitals in the red, hospital officials said in a

By REBECCA HANSEN-WHITE/KLCC News EUGENE — The Oregon Health Authority has found that Eugene-based Oregon Medical Group, and two insurers, unreasonably increased healthcare costs. Oregon has been trying to rein in healthcare spending for years. In 2019, lawmakers created a program  to study and limit healthcare costs. Under the program, healthcare companies operating in Oregon are only allowed to increase

By MAXINE BERNSTEIN/The Oregonian/OregonLive A Eugene-based wood treatment facility and its president have agreed to pay $1.5 million in criminal fines for illegal treatment of hazardous waste in violation of the Clean Air Act’s pollution control regulations. J.H. Baxter & Co. Inc. on Wednesday pleaded guilty to illegally treating hazardous waste, and the company president, Georgia Baxter-Krause, 61, of Deschutes,

By JULIA SHUMWAY/Oregon Capital Chronicle SALEM — Oregon joined Washington, Arizona and Illinois on Tuesday in suing President Donald Trump and several cabinet officials over his attempt to withhold citizenship from babies born in the United States to immigrants. For more than 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has guaranteed that all people born in the country

By Oregon Capital Chronicle staff SALEM — Oregon’s 90 lawmakers are beginning their work in earnest on Tuesday, with about five months to pass a spending plan for the next two years, figure out how to plug a transportation funding hole and make progress on the state’s housing crisis. Lawmakers have introduced nearly 2,300 bills so far, with more to