Best quote that simplifies an issue to its most basic

"Urban renewal? We call it 'The Black Removal,' " said Willie Norman, 63, who grew up in the area.

Go look at State Initiative #144 for a solution tailored to the poor. I have pondered yet another solution: limit all guaranteed home buying interest rate stuff to perhaps the first 100,000 so as to not fuel the price escalation of homes in the higher brackets for the higher income folks. I really do not see the need to subsidize someone's desire to upscale from 1500 square feet to 2,00 or 3,000 square feet.

There is another weird characterization from discussion of health insurance. It should always be health coverage not health insurance. Kitzhaber presents the social effect of the problem clearly as:

"So instead of giving everyone coverage for something -- as we do with public education -- we give some people coverage for everything and others coverage for nothing," Kitzhaber said. "That is how we ration health care today in America."

Yet a more implicit recognition in the situation is that the poor are not merely temporarily poor but that they are not expected to ever be able to pay for the cost of care. That is, they are health care poor forever.

The hospital folks view it as a state funding spicket problem:

"Ultimately, it affects all of us," said Ken Rutledge, president of the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, which represents the state's 58 hospitals. Employers and insured patients pay higher premiums and higher medical bills to cover the cost of treating the uninsured.

The price that is charged is viewed as fixed and not itself the result of contortion upwards by policy.