Rep. Helfrich: OHA shows again that it can’t get the job done

By Oregon House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich

House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich (R-Hood River) issued a statement  after the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) wasted $80 million appropriated for behavioral health by having no results to show for it. An audit determined that OHA was “not able to show the effectiveness of incentive programs, due to a lack of performance metrics and outcome measurements.”

“Oregon is in the midst of an unprecedented behavioral health crisis, and the agency tasked with fixing it has demonstrated yet again that it is wholly ineffective,” said Helfrich. “OHA cannot define what successful behavioral health treatment looks like in part because it is still enabling the drug problem by distributing drug paraphernalia. This is disappointing, though not surprising, for an agency that shows again and again that it cannot be trusted to get the job done.”

The failure to instill any sort of accountability or success metrics while overseeing a large amount of funding is the latest scandal in recent years. Others include:

1. Gov. Tina Kotek’s brazen insistence on giving excessive governmental attention and authority to her wife Aimee Kotek-Wilson. This has included most recently a lavish $200,000 one-day summit to promote Kotek-Wilson and using governmental resources to advocate for her personal friends. Six senior staffers have left the Kotek administration as a result.
2. The OHA deliberately suppressed a report on the alcohol tax’s ineffectiveness to sway the legislature into taking its preferred, activist, course of action. Worse, recently uncovered emails show federal officials at the CDC were concerned about the report as early as 2022.
3. A judge accused an OHA employee of lying and held the OHA in contempt for deliberately withholding a patient’s treatment progress.
4. Director Sejal Haithi fired OHA’s long-time equity chief because there were “significant delays” in investigating internal civil rights complaints.
5. The entire disaster of the Measure 110 rollout, including tens of millions of dollars distributed to unaccountable NGOs, and most notoriously a $10,000 per call hotline that cannot point to any callers seeking treatment.
6. The explosion of fentanyl and opioid deaths in Oregon, especially among young adults and children.
7. The OHA’s and Human Services’ long-running inability to house foster children, most recently leading to the death by suicide of a child under their care.
8. A report about the testing progress of rape-kits never made it to the legislature because of “bureaucratic breakdowns,” and the subsequent discovery that Oregon has a backlog of close to 1000 test kits with an average wait time of over 240 days.