Oregon voters OK health taxes to keep Medicaid expansion

In a special election Tuesday, Oregon voters approved a tax on hospitals and health-insurance plans to continue funding the state's Medicaid expansion. It's the first time a state has approved such a measure by referendum, and "the second time that the Medicaid expansion has won at the polls: Maine voters in November overwhelmingly supported bringing the Medicaid expansion to their state," Sarah Kliff reports for Vox. The tax could raise as much as $320 million over two years.

The referendum almost didn't happen, since last spring Oregon legislators considered ending Medicaid expansion to balance the state's budget. That would have made the state the first in the country to repeal an expansion. But the Democrat-controlled state legislature voted to pass a 1.5 percent tax on premiums collected by health insurers and a 0.7 percent increase on the tax rate collected from some hospitals, Elon Glucklich reports for The Register-Guard in Eugene. In response, some Republican state representatives gathered enough signatures to put the taxes up for vote through Oregon's referendum process.

About 62 percent of Oregon voters favored Measure 101, with more than 1 million votes cast; much of rural Oregon voted against it. The referendum's success "may catch the eye of other states with difficult budget situations as a way to bring in additional revenue," Kliff reports.