Health

CareOregon to Add Legacy Medical Group to Network

Official says deal will make it easier for CareOregon members to access care within Legacy Health System.

By Andrew Schwartz
CareOregon's headquarters, seen in downtown Portland. (Andrew Schwartz)

Beginning next year, CareOregon members will have more access to care in the Legacy Health System than before, according to a spokesperson for Health Share of Oregon.

CareOregon, through the Oregon Health Plan, insures hundreds of thousands of members in the Portland metro area. Now, the Legacy Medical Group will “officially join the CareOregon provider network, serving its members through the Tri-County metro area,” said Stephanie Sever, the Health Share spokesperson.

The move comes amid a broad reshuffling in the area’s highly convoluted Medicaid system.

Health Share of Oregon is one of two so-called coordinated care organizations that contract with the state to run the Oregon Health Plan in the Portland metro area. Health Share is itself something of an umbrella organization, as it subcontracts the insurance work to several health insurance companies, with CareOregon taking the largest member share.

As health costs rise fast, another insurer, PacificSource, in recent weeks announced it was pulling out of Health Share, leaving it unclear where its 20,000 Health Share members—part of the Legacy Health PacificSource medical plan—would get their insurance.

Clarity arrived in Sever’s Thursday email: Those members will be automatically transitioned to CareOregon.

Some details are apparently still being fleshed out. In most cases, the soon-to-be former Legacy Health PacificSource members will be able to continue receiving care from their existing providers, Severs said. Asked about what the exceptions to this were, she said she does not yet have an answer, but hopes to by next week.

Legacy and CareOregon do already have a relationship. Even now, a Legacy webpage, for example, says it says it offers “specialty and hospital services” to CareOregon members.

Still, in her email, Severs confirmed that as part of the deal, already-existing CareOregon members will have more access to health care at Legacy than before.

The Legacy Health System and CareOregon did not respond to emailed questions Thursday afternoon.

Andrew Schwartz

Andrew Schwartz

Andrew Schwartz writes about health care. He's spent years reporting on political and spiritual movements, most recently covering religion and immigration for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and before this as a freelancer covering labor and public policy for various magazines. He began his career at the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.

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