The Bitchtucci Voter Guide: Oregon Special Election January 2k18

here’s an inspirational photo of some cypress trees i saw at the oregon coast that i was v. into

Okay. You’ve made it through 2017. I hope you are reading this somewhere safe and warm. It was a hard year, right? But the first of January carried a glorious supermoon on its shoulders and its glow heralds high holy Capricorn season. It’s time to get to fuckin’ work.

I love you. I believe in you. I know we didn’t all make it through last year, and we mourn those we lost to death, deportation, the prison industrial complex, hate crimes, gun violence, climate change-related devastation, and more — we lament and honor suffering large and small, life-threatening and life-exhausting. I know that many cards are stacked at extremely creepy and unsettling angles against many of us.

So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to wake up. Drink a glass of water. Because 2018 is the year we FINALLY drink enough water!!! Unseal those thick ballot envelopes without paper-cutting ourselves. BECAUSE 2018 IS THE YEAR WE FINALLY STOP DOING SMALL HOUSEHOLD TASKS RECKLESSLY AND DISTRACTEDLY AND GENERALLY IN WAYS THAT CAUSE CARELESS INJURIES! And we’re going to take our weary bodies, teeming with ideas and magic, and v o t e.

A spot of housekeeping, my babes:

• This is a statewide election concerning one ballot measure. If you’re an Oregon voter, this means you. It’s a biggie, one with actual lives caught in the balance, but of course they couldn’t make it an elegant no-brainer. Read on for the agony and the ecstasy.
• Ballots started being mailed out on January 3rd (aka my dog’s birthday. Thirteen! He’s such a good boy!). You can check here to see if you’re registered and what address they have, and this same link will work to track your ballot once you turn it in.
• The last of the ballots were mailed out on January 9th, so if you don’t get your ballot by January 15th, it may have gone to the wrong address or been eaten by a crow with a grudge. It happens. You can call with enough head’s up for them to mail another, or pick up a replacement ballot in person at your local elections office if you have state ID with you aaaaalll the way up to the time the office closes on election day. You can EVEN pick up a replacement ballot on BEHALF of someone if they give you a note with their signature giving you consent to pick it up on their behalf; I did it this past November ON ELECTION DAY to pick up my mama’s ballot because that little bird doesn’t drive anymore, bless her.
  Your local elections office is also the place to call if you would like voting accommodations, including alternative format ballots — HTML ballots for folks who are unable to mark a printed ballot, larger print, and so on. Any voter with a disability can also request assistance from their county for registration, voting, or returning a ballot. They might be able to hook ya up with a pickup in your own home, for instance. For details, you can also call 1–866–673-8683. You deserve these accommodations, and voting is your MOTHER. FUCKING. RIGHT.
• We shall vote, ya hear?! ‘Cuz votes are bein’ suppressed hither and thither. Oregon’s vote-by-mail initiative certainly penalizes folks without a permanent address or the means to buy a stamp (contact me if you are having a hard time with a workaround and I’ll brainstorm with you), but it also allows people who work full time, people who can’t physically get to a polling place, people who need extra time with the ballot, and so many other types of folks to vote. In many ways, many of us are blessèd by receiving a ballot in the mail, and if we can, we certainly must show up to vote on local measures.
• Ballots must be in by 8pm on Tuesday, January 23rd. So mail that puppy with a stamp no later than Wednesday, January 17th, or drop off without a stamp at any public library or many other ballot drop boxes, searchable here.
• There are many, many important tunes to cruise as you ponder your vote, including but not limited to SZA’s entire “CTRL” album, “The Bus Song” by Jay Som, and “Don’t Don’t Do It!” by N.E.R.D. Haim’s cover of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” is probably my most-sung-aloud-in-my-car-while-I-invariably-run-fifteen-minutes-late-to-all-of-my-goddamn-social-engagements track. It’s a very important takeaway from 2k17.

Ballot Measure 101: Approves temporary assessments to fund health care for low-income individuals and families, and to stabilize health insurance premiums. Temporary assessments on insurance companies, some hospitals, and other providers of insurance or health care coverage. Insurers may not increase rates on health insurance premiums by more than 1.5 percent as a result of these assessments. What a MOUTHFUL.

Yes. Okay, so let’s get into it.

What’s fascinating about this ballot measure is that arguments for and against have tended to circle one another without engaging in the intersection of a true cost-benefit analysis. I coach my high school debate students against doing this — “You need clash,” I say. They roll their eyes. They think, What’s this deeply uncool wretch yelling at us this time?! (Just kidding. I’m the coolest.) I say: Go head to head with each contention the opposing team brings up. It’s not enough to dispute general background; weigh the merits of each line of their case against yours, and then tell me who’s tipped the scale overall.
So venture with me, sweet bb. Let’s go hunting for some clash.

Here are the two big threads I see. Pro-101 says, “We need state healthcare funding right now; better healthcare has all of these incredible benefits like fewer student absences, increased services for our most vulnerable,” et cetera ad nauseam. Anti-101 doesn’t engage with those points because…what the fuck can you say to that? Common sense in the larger universe outside of this ballot measure allows us to believe the empirical evidence demonstrating that higher rates of healthcare coverage correlate to less missed school, and so on. Instead, Anti-101 says, “We can’t pay for this right now. Wait for a better ballot measure because this bill taxes organizations who ought not be taxed like hospitals and public schools instead of taxing big corporations.” And Pro-101 doesn’t particularly engage with the point of funding because, yeah, it’s true that a 1.5% assessment on the Public Employees Benefits Board, managed care providers, and insurers isn’t an amazing source of funding.

So here’s the clash— Even if we wish the money could come from other places, is it worth passing this now for the benefit of the people who would lose coverage?

Yeah. It’s gotta be a hell yeah. What are those lives worth to you? Let’s be clear here. We are discussing LITERAL lives directly impacted by funding and policy in the first degree.

Access to healthcare saves lives. When you don’t have healthcare, you have a difficult choice to make when you get sick. Do you get care when it starts early, or do you want to avoid the sometimes tens of thousands of dollars care can cost, waiting until it becomes life-threatening? And by then, what if it’s too late?

And okay, this is an inconvenient pickle to be in. Public health entities like Medicaid and OHP in Oregon have been hanging by a tenuous little thread for a number of years, with meaningful reform deferred repeatedly and also often struck down in previous years’ attempts to secure corporate and/or public funding through state legislation and ballot measures. (Thanks, voters.) So here we are, in a moment where if 101 doesn’t pass, there will be a hole left from the expiration of other sources of funding. And it ain’t a small hole. It’s a large hole with a thin bottom that will give way to a deeper federal funding hole. If we don’t secure state funding, then we’ll lose federal dollars that are only accessible through matching, resulting in a giant, gaping hole of upwards of $1.3 billion.

uh like, for effect, here’s what came up when i googled “stock image of a hole”

Anti-101 asks, “Why are we asking public school teacher benefits boards to pay for Measure 101?” But as a public school educator myself, and in solidarity with the many educational organizations that endorse 101 like the Oregon Education Association, the Oregon-PTA, and the Head Start Association of Oregon, I’m gonna go ahead and say vote yes anyway. It’s not the best source of funding, but our kids are going to suffer in the thousands if we don’t pass 101 now.

Certain hospitals will be asked to pay a 0.7% assessment, and the same, “Why them?!?!?” critique has been lanced. And yet nurses, doctors, and oodles of hospitals endorse 101 because when people lose insurance, a couple of shitty things happen, including hospitals and individuals getting stuck with disproportionately expensive emergency care coverage that could have been avoided by sensible preventative care covered by OHP and Medicaid.

Here’s a cycle I’m deeply fed up with: we try to tax corporations and these corporations pay for really slick advertisements and then those ballot measures fail. Repeatedly. Cue sweaty midnight Measure 97 trauma flashbacks.

Not to be too Conspiracy Theorist Barbie, but we all know very well that the system is entrenched with corporate interests, to the point that it seems that even the most magical, perfectly written, elegantly balanced corporate tax ballot measure will fail. Time and time again, it will fail. So these choppier and stranger versions of ballot measures get hoisted to the table by their weak ankles to stop some of the bleeding. Then critics say, “This ballot measure is flawed! Don’t pass it, what a horrible idea, start from the drawing board and try again!” And so we, what, keep deferring? Even knowing that the game was rigged to ensure indefinite deferral? Even though each iteration is getting progressively weaker?

Nay, I say. We pass this shit now. We do it for the 350,000 poor Oregonians whose Medicaid would be at risk if this doesn’t pass. We do it to secure the federal dollars we need to keep the 1 million low-income Oregonians on state-sponsored insurance, including kids, including the elderly, including veterans, including my all-suffering mama.

And then we stretch out our limbs and say, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a sensible corporate tax here in Oregon that is painstakingly rendered so that Nike doesn’t flee and fire hella employees but also so that Nike PAYS A FUCKIN’ FAIR SHARE?!” And we’ve all got to be invested in the knowledge dissemination and accountability practices that would allow such a reality to manifest. It’s not impossible. In fact, it may be the only way.

I highly recommend a perusal of your Oregon Voters’ Pamphlet for a truly incredible piece of theatre (with any luck, it should have been delivered to you in December, but you can always access it in English, Spanish, and in an audio file here). Oddball Republican Rep. Julie Parrish has made No-on-101 her personal hill to die on. She furnished what feels like 95% of the Arguments in Opposition in the Oregon Voters’ Guide in a series of solicitations of personal stories that are at best reductive, and at worst manipulative of even the people lending their stories to the crusade.

I rarely bother with respectability politics in my analysis of political arguments, but I did laugh disappointedly at some sarcasm-lite troll Arguments in Favor that slipped their way into the Oregon Voters’ Guide. One subheading says, “Oregon Public Schools Are Doing Such a GREAT Job…The Legislature Decided to Defund Schools by $25,000,000!” Kindly fuck right off, and encourage your friends and family not to fall for this #weak #basic shit.

I worry that this won’t pass. People hate a tax. And people, including many principled moderates, hate that it’s called an assessment and not a tax. A tomato tomahto quibble is not enough to lose this healthcare funding. If you’re in a position to annoy your friends and family members about voting, especially outside of the Portland Metro area, I urge you to shoulder that responsibility with the seriousness and care that such a task requires. I’m with you when you do it, uncomfortable or strained as it may be. Hype yourself up. And get to work.

If you enjoyed this voter guide, instead of donating to me, consider throwing a couple of bucks at my dear mama’s ongoing medical fundraiser. She’s lucky enough to be enrolled in OHP, which has saved her life on a number of occasions. Without OHP or with a reduction of benefits, we would be devastated. We’re about to move her into a new apartment to escape her predatory, unethical current landlord, and I’m a grad school student in Dickensian levels of dire straits who is ~*extremely panicked*~ about moving costs. We are so grateful to all of you who have donated in the past. We dream of a world where my job in public education and health insurance alone would be enough to sustain our family, but right now it’s just not enough. Thank you. We love you.
xo,
Bitchtucci