Mitch Greenlick

Fuchs: I am with Mitch Greenlick, who is a member of the State House of Representatives and a member of the Oregon Jewish community. Thank you for doing this interview for the Oregon Jewish Museum Oral History Project. I very much appreciate you taking the time.
GREENLICK: Happy to be here.

Fuchs: I noticed in looking at your CV, that you are a graduate of Wayne State University and you got a graduate degree at the University of Michigan. Are you from Detroit?
GREENLICK: I’m from Detroit, born and raised there.

Fuchs: So you and I have that in common. Tell me about your childhood in Detroit and your experience in that community before we talk about Oregon and your experience with the Oregon Jewish community.
GREENLICK: I grew up in the heart of the Jewish ghetto in NW Detroit. I graduated from Central High School in 1952, lived in that neighborhood until I got married in 1956.

Fuchs: That was the old Dexter and Davidson neighborhood?
GREENLICK: Yes, exactly. Dexter and Lawrence. It was a wonderful environment. Are you from that same area?

Fuchs: Yes. I’m from that same neighborhood. Then my parents moved to Oak Park.
GREENLICK: And Dexter and Davidson, of course, was the rich part of that neighborhood [laughter].

Fuchs: Detroit had a very vital and active Jewish community.
GREENLICK: Yes. I think that it was maybe one of the five or six biggest in the country at that time. It was very interesting. Dexter at that time was divided. One side of Dexter was essentially working-class homes, the kind of home I grew up in. I grew up in a frame house, small lot. My folks bought it in ’45 for $2,800 dollars or something like that. On the other side of Dexter were more substantial houses. They were mostly brick, the sort of four-bedroom, two-bath kind of houses that the Jewish doctors and lawyers lived in. I used to work in a deli and butcher shop on Dexter where I would deliver into the richer side of Dexter. It was a marvelous neighborhood to grow up in.

Fuchs: There was a richness to it, and I was impressed, when much of the Jewish community moved towards Oak Park — which is a very close suburb — that the Dexter and Davidson market moved out there and kept the name because it was so familiar to people.
GREENLICK: Yes. My folks moved after I got married. I got married in ’56. After that, they moved to the Seven Mile Road area, which is where the Jewish community had metastasized [laughter] as the neighborhood I grew up in got more and more integrated.

Fuchs: There was a Jewish community center on Seven Mile Road, I remember.
GREENLICK: That’s right. Seven Mile and Wyoming, I think.

Fuchs: Did you make use of that very much?
GREENLICK: No. I made use of the old Jewish Community Center, which was essentially near Davidson. I remember that area. I did that, and then the Workmen’s Circle over on Linwood. On my mother’s side, the Workmen’s Circle was a dangerous place because it had a bunch of communists [laughter]. That was her view of that.

Fuchs: That’s great. My dad was president of the Workmen’s Circle for 22 years.
GREENLICK: When it was there? That’s where I used to play basketball. That’s where, I think, the AZA team played. It was a wonderful neighborhood. It was wonderful being Jewish in that neighborhood because you didn’t really think about being Jewish. It was all there was. Every corner had a butcher shop and a [inaudible word] grocery store and a Viennese bakery.

Fuchs: And Yiddish was spoken all over the neighborhood.
GREENLICK: Yes. I think my grandmother probably understood English, but she only spoke Yiddish, so her kids all spoke Yiddish, my mother and her — it was a very real, very vibrant neighborhood. Did you go to Central as well?

Fuchs: No. I ended up going to Park High School.
GREENLICK: Ahh. My brother went to Mumford.

Fuchs: My brother-in-law went to Mumford.
GREENLICK: Yes, that’s when they moved out.

Fuchs: And you went to Wayne State for your undergraduate years?
GREENLICK: That’s right. I graduated Central and got on a bus and went to college. I did my pharmacy degree and my pharmacy administration, my master’s degree also, both at Wayne State before I went to the University of Michigan.

Fuchs: And you worked as a pharmacist for a while?
GREENLICK: I worked as a pharmacist. I actually was a partner in a drugstore for a brief time. Shortly after I graduated from pharmacy, I was invited to come back to start teaching in the College of Pharmacy, first as a lab assistant for a year and then, eventually, I became essentially the whole Department of Pharmacy Administration. While I was getting my master’s degree in Pharmacy Administration, I was teaching four classes in it at that time. From that time on, I was just kind of part-time in drugstores to make a living, which I didn’t make as an instructor of pharmacy.

Fuchs: No, I imagine the drugstore might have been a more lucrative enterprise [laughter].
GREENLICK: It was more reliable, at any rate.

Fuchs: And then you got interested in public health.
GREENLICK: Well, I accidently got interested in public health. I was teaching, and what happened was the person who was teaching that program was an alcoholic and finally became non-functional. The dean of the College of Pharmacy, who had been kind of my mentor at that point, was a Pharmacy Administration faculty person, and he said that he’d hired me to teach the classes and he would teach me how to teach the classes as I went along for my master’s degree.

So I got my master’s degree and I was an instructor, but it was clear I needed to get a PhD in order to be able to — I loved teaching and I needed to get a PhD, so I started hunting around for a PhD, and I accidently, and I mean literally accidently, stumbled across this program at Ann Arbor. I had written my master’s thesis on pre-paid drug insurance, and there was a pre-paid drug insurance program in Windsor, Ontario, at that time, and they had given me some information. I left my master’s thesis with the owner of that pre-paid drug insurance program. Windsor, Ontario, had 100% physician coverage at that time — they were very much ahead of the wave — and they had this pharmacy program as well.

A guy who became my professor at Ann Arbor eventually was the research consultant to that program, and he saw my thesis while he was waiting for the guy he was advising, who was busy, and said to him, “If this fellow is interested in a graduate program, tell him to come and see me in Ann Arbor.” He called me and suggested that, and I went to Ann Arbor. The program at that time was called Public Health Economics. Later, it became renamed Medical Care Organization. But I was just looking for a PhD, and I was already committed to teaching at Wayne State. I thought, “OK. If they’ll take me, I’ll go to this program.” I didn’t know what it was.

Fuchs: Did you actually move to Ann Arbor for that program?
GREENLICK: We did, and the first year I was already committed to teaching at Wayne State, so I was teaching five classes in Detroit and taking five classes in Ann Arbor and driving 120 miles a day between them.

Fuchs: That was an arduous schedule.
GREENLICK: It was a terrible schedule [laughs]. Our third child was born that November. We had three kids, the oldest of whom was three and a half years old. Harriet decided we had to move to Ann Arbor so it would get more rational, and we did in ’62. We spent the last two years at Ann Arbor when I was working there.

Fuchs: Was Sy Axelrod there when you came?
GREENLICK: Sy was the chairman of the department when I was there.

Fuchs: He was a remarkable man. He helped to write the Medicaid bill.
GREENLICK: That’s right. He was an amazing guy. He and [inaudible name] came the same year I came. He was on my graduate committee. They were an amazing bunch. I was relatively conservative, the typical Jewish attitudes, sort of liberal on some things and sort of conservative on others. Sy taught me how to sing “Joe Hill.”

Fuchs: That’s pretty impressive. He was a remarkable guy.
GREENLICK: Did you know him personally? Did you know him and Pearl?

Fuchs: I had dinner with him. I had a very good friend who ended up on the faculty of the public health program there. They had an empty chair at their dinner table one day, and I was able to meet him and spend an evening with him.
GREENLICK: Great guy.

Fuchs: He was really impressive. To be in the room with someone that actually worked on the Medicaid bill and was one of the principal writers of that title.
GREENLICK: Yes, he was involved with Wilbur Cohen. I remember him being in a room with Wilbur when we were fighting about some elements of the Medicaid program. Wilbur said, “Dammit. It’s enough to make you lose faith in socialized medicine” [laughter]. He was a great guy.

Fuchs: Was that a significant influence on you in terms of your later public policy work?
GREENLICK: It certainly influenced me. The department was very interesting because it was both a very academic department and a very socially active department. My faculty advisor, Ben Darsky, was a really straight medical sociologist and very much involved in research methods. I essentially did half of my work in the School of Public Health and half in the Institute of Social Research at Michigan, so I got a very strict research training. But at the same time, [inaudible name] and Sy Berky, who was an economist, were very much involved in socializing me to the public policy perspective. It was a very unusual PHC program in that it really had both elements of it. It was both a public health major and a social science major.

Fuchs: Yes, that’s a really interesting combination.
GREENLICK: And not a very comfortable one. Both sides of the department were constantly in turmoil fighting over if it was going to be social policy or if it was going to be social research. I managed to come away with both elements, although I remember going to my advisor and saying, “You know, if I took a course in epidemiology and a course in environmental health on the way” — they were interesting courses anyway — “I could get an MPH while I was getting a PhD.” He said, “You don’t need an MPH. You already have a master’s degree.” I said, “Yes, but I would take those classes . . ..” He said, “You don’t need an MPH.” It was very clear to me. I was going to have a choice of getting an MPH or a PhD, but I wasn’t going to get both of them because those were the other guys.

Fuchs: That’s interesting. So your first was a PhD.
GREENLICK: Yes, that’s what I was there for. And I did already have a master’s.

Fuchs: You published extensively. Could you talk a little bit about the areas of research that interested you?
GREENLICK: I was invited to come to Oregon when I was ready to leave Michigan. I hadn’t finished my PhD. I had all my classwork, and I had done my fieldwork also in Windsor, Ontario, on prescription utilization in the community. I was invited to come to Kaiser to start a research center. When I started the program in ’61, the field of health service research was a very primitive field. I was probably the first or second person formally trained as a health services researcher. That was basically what my training was.

But by the time I came out, Medicaid was on the horizon — it was a lively field — and I had about 60 job offers. I was considering going to Yale, and I was considering a job at Case Western Reserve, things like that. Then I decided for a really good experience I wanted to be somewhere where I could see mountains. I let it be known that I wanted to come west, and some friends of mine got me in contact with Kaiser. That was an interesting experience. I got a phone call one day from the fellow who eventually became my mentor here in Portland and my boss, the founding director of Kaiser Permanente in the northwest. He said he heard I was interested in coming west, and would I like to think about coming to Portland, Oregon. And I just had this vision of Portland being somewhere north of British Columbia or something. I really wasn’t sure. I’m sure you had some of that same experience. I said to him, “I kind of wanted to get someplace that didn’t have so much snow.” There was this pause on the end of the line, and he said, “Well, if you’re as smart as your teachers say you are, you can probably figure out how to get an almanac and find out what the weather is really like in Portland” [laughter]. I thought, “Well, this might be someone I’d like to work with.”

So I was brought here to start a research center, and this turned out to be the ideal place for me because it had all the elements of the kind of research I wanted to do. I was interested in understanding the utilization patterns of a population. It intrigued me how a population within the medical care system ended up using a particular distribution of medical care services. I was curious about it, and I wanted to create a general theory of demand for healthcare. This was what I was really interested in. I was also interested in doing demonstration projects of different kinds. I wanted to find different ways of delivering medical care services, and I was offered the great opportunity to come here. That was 1964. What was interesting about this was that it had a population base that was known and identified, it had a single medical record for everybody serviced, and it had a medical care system that was willing to be changed experimentally to do different things in a different sort of way. It fit right into my research interests. Many of the first articles were on utilization factors and medical care utilization, but also — I came in 1964. By ’66 I had two federal contracts, one to do a long-term-care demonstration and one to begin looking at post-hospital utilization stuff. It just fed right into my interests.

Fuchs: So really, when you sort of came of age professionally, it was at the time of the creation of the Medicare and the Medicaid system and the War on Poverty and these efforts to really have an impact using social policy on the health and well-being of society. Then, as a leader in our public sector, you’ve been a presence in terms of Oregon’s public policy around health and human services, and of course, the implementation of the Oregon Health Plan and all of those kinds of things. It’s a really fascinating sweep of work that you got to be in the middle of.
GREENLICK: Two of the earliest projects — one was, we had done a study on post-hospital needs, looking at what the underlying factors were that would create post-hospital needs. We estimated that the Medicare estimates of each managed care facility and home care services was completely off, and we were proven pretty right. After we did that, the Public Health Service came to me and said, “We’d be curious about what it would take to expand the long-term-care services of Medicare to the entire population.” It was a pretty liberal party in those days. Johnson was the president. Things were happening. We were given a contract. We had an extra wing at Bess Kaiser Hospital, and we turned it into an extended-care facility. I started the first home care project in an HMO anywhere in the country.

We made Medicare long-term-care services available to the whole Kaiser population at that time — that was 100,000 people — and tested what the elements were, and providing skilled home care and skilled nursing facility services in that kind of integrated setting. We were a little late doing it, and we finally passed on a report to the Public Health Service. The week after we passed on the report, they were testifying to Congress on what it would take to expand Medicare services to the whole population using our data.

At the same time also, the War on Poverty was coming around, and Johnson had declared that they wanted to have 10,000 neighborhood health clinics around to provide care. Ernie Sayward — who was my boss and sort of my mentor at that time — and I went to them and said, “Why don’t you force the existing medical care system to take care of poor people? You don’t have to create independent clinics to do that.” We got a contract from OEO, a neighborhood health center project, to start one of the first five neighborhood health centers by enrolling 8,000 poor people into the Kaiser System here. I also was involved on the other side. As a part of social action, I also started the program that became the Virginia García Clinic. In fact, I was arrested in a migrant camp trying to take a kid up to services at that time. That was kind of an interesting period.

Fuchs: Tell me about that.
GREENLICK: I was on the board of the Community Action Program in Washington County. In those days, I lived in Washington County. There was a sort of left-wing Latino organization that wanted to have some VISTAs [Volunteers in Service to America], VISTA workers in those days. The farmers in the community didn’t trust this left-wing group, but they decided it made sense to have a VISTA program. So I volunteered under the auspices of the Community Action Program to run a VISTA program. We had the first program of VISTA workers. I usually had six of them reporting to me, as a part of my social activities.

It became clear that there wasn’t any way to get medical care for the migrants. In those days, 50,000 migrants came through Oregon in the picking season. So I organized a group of Spanish-speaking Kaiser doctors to start providing medical care for them. We had a Wednesday night and a Saturday clinic, and eventually Providence took over, and it became the Virginia García Clinic. But in the meantime, we were taking people out of the migrant camps and taking them to see the doctor on Wednesday night and Saturday. One farmer down in Scholls wouldn’t let my VISTAs into the camp to take a kid to the doctor even though we had a note from the parents inviting us to do that. I went to argue with him with a television crew and others, and they ended up swearing out a warrant for me for trespass for coming to his camp to argue with him. We ended up with Neil Goldschmidt defending me on that case.

Fuchs: He was a public defender then?
GREENLICK: No, he was Legal Aid. He was doing it off the record because Legal Aid wasn’t supposed to be doing criminal stuff. We ended up getting the case remanded into Federal Court, into Judge Solomon’s court, because he found an 1838 federal statute that had been put in place because the states were arresting their revenuers who came in to collect the whiskey tax. It went into Judge Solomon’s court, and Judge Solomon essentially established the right for VISTAs to get into migrant camps as the result of that.

Fuchs: That’s so interesting on a couple of folds. One, just in terms of the intense nature of the work that you had to do to organize a community and to provide basic health services at that time. Secondly, how interesting that when you as a Jewish public health professional working for Kaiser ended up facing a challenge, you were defended by a Jewish attorney who later became the mayor of this city [Portland] and the governor.
GREENLICK: Exactly.

Fuchs: And then the federal judge who heard the case was Gus Solomon, who . . .
GREENLICK: An amazing guy!

Fuchs: He was quite a remarkable man.
GREENLICK: Yes, and his legal clerk at that time, Judge Solomon’s clerk, his wife was working for me at the same time at the research center. We had a very complicated network.

Fuchs: Yes, it’s a really interesting network. Let’s digress and talk a little about Jewish community — but I want to get back to public policy with you because it’s such a significant aspect of your life. You were talking about the neighborhood that you grew up in in Detroit. Oregonians don’t know that sort of neighborhood. There was a strong ethnic neighborhood here in old South Portland, but it was considerably different than . . .
GREENLICK: My old neighborhood.

Fuchs: It was considerably different than what was in Detroit in terms of the density of the Jewish community and the refugee populations that came in and so on.
GREENLICK: We lived in the shtetl.

Fuchs: Yes. It really was, wasn’t it?
GREENLICK: Yes. We lived next to a synagogue. There was a synagogue at the other end of the block. The high school I went to was probably 80% Jewish. When Jewish holidays came, they basically shut down the high school.

Fuchs: Did you go to Winterhalter Elementary School?
GREENLICK: No, I went to Mccaroll. Winterhalter was on Broad Street, and we were further toward Joy Road from Winterhalter, so it was Mccaroll. You didn’t really think about being Jewish when you grew up in that neighborhood because you just were. It was interesting.

My mother died when I was in graduate school, when I was working on my PhD in Ann Arbor. It was a very unfortunate experience. Her cousin was one of her doctors, and they said she lied to us about her condition. She died without me really being able to say goodbye to her, and it was very upsetting to me. So I decided — I hadn’t been in a synagogue since my bar mitzvah at that point. My family wasn’t observant. My grandmother was very observant, but not my mother and father.

I decided to say Kaddish daily for a year after my mother died to try to come to some grips with — the interesting thing was, when I started going to services, I was very familiar with the [inaudible] service. I didn’t know why because I had never been in that synagogue. I could sing the songs. I remember singing L’cha Dodi, the welcoming of the Sabbath song. It finally came to me that I grew up next door to the synagogue. When I was young, I wouldn’t go to sleep at an early age, and the windows were open and the windows in the synagogue were open because it wasn’t air conditioned. Every Friday night I got the service in my, from the time I was . . .

Fuchs: That’s fascinating.
GREENLICK: . . . very young, and I could — it was a very familiar service. It was a very reassuring service. In Ann Arbor, it was a little hard to organize Kaddish every day, but we managed to do that, and I was still saying Kaddish when we moved to Portland, so I got in somewhat immediate contact with the Jewish community.

Fuchs: I was wondering about Ann Arbor. There has always been a large Jewish student body in Ann Arbor. And of course, Axelrod . . .
GREENLICK: Axelrod was an atheist as well; he was non-observant. The congregation was in the Hillel building. There was a relatively wealthy and very large family that were junk dealers, now scrap dealers, whatever. They supported the community synagogue that was in the Hillel. Typically, we had a cantor who was an opera student, a fabulous cantor. They would hold Saturday services. There was a young rabbi named Rabbi White. There was a community, but I was calling every morning and getting one of the other brothers to show up to make sure that we had a minyan. But it was an interesting experience and brought me back into the Jewish community in a way that I had never been in it before.

Fuchs: So when you came to Oregon, did you connect to the Jewish community here?
GREENLICK: I got accidentally connected to the Jewish community. There was a group of left-wing, secular Jews that decided they needed something that was the equivalent of a Sunday school. So we started — some people I’m sure you know, Bill and Helen Gordon were involved in that, the Frankels, Ruthie and Herman [inaudible last name], a bunch of us started this thing we called the Jewish Study Group. It was essentially a group of about 20 families that would get together and do Jewish things to get our kids identified with the Jewish community. We would have a big seder where we developed our own — I wrote my first haggadah with that.

Fuchs: It’s a little reminiscent of the Workmen’s Circle.
GREENLICK: It was very reminiscent of that, or now maybe Kol Israel would be the most equivalent. Arden Schenker was the president of the Jewish Education Association and heard this thing was going on. He called me and said, “I hear you’re involved in this alternative Jewish activity from the United — no, United Hebrew was the Hebrew School I was thrown out of in Detroit. The JEA was kind of interested in how to provide services for the non-affiliated population. I joined the board of the JEA, and I became, was referred to once in the Jewish newspaper here as the “house atheist of the Jewish community.” I became very formally a representative of the non-affiliated population, and I eventually became president of the JEA. At that point, I engineered the merger between the Hebrew School and JEA to produce the Portland Jewish Academy.

Fuchs: Wasn’t Ivan Inger also?
GREENLICK: Ivan was the vice-president when I was the president, and he was the president of JEA when it actually happened, but I had put all the pieces in place. As a result of that, being president of JEA, I got on the Federation board and on the Allocations Committee and got sort of involved…

Fuchs: You got to really know the community.
GREENLICK: I’ve been involved in one way or another. I’ve been on the Jewish Family and Child Service board, and I’ve been continually sort of the representative of the non-affiliated population.

Fuchs: How has Judaism and being a member of the Jewish people influenced your work in terms of public policy and human services? Was it a defining factor also, or . . .?
GREENLICK: It was suddenly defining. There is no question in my mind that the Jewish values, the values of charity and social service and those values, were just sort of hard-wired. My mother was very much involved in managing things. In fact, when my brother ended up going to high school, she got a job as secretary to a rabbi in a Conservative congregation. She managed to run 550 families from that position. Social service and public policy just have always been — I consider that a part of my Jewish identity, and I have a very strong Jewish identity. A very strong cultural identity. I came to it late.

The truth of the matter is, when we were in Detroit, I never thought about being Jewish; everybody was Jewish. You were just Jewish. Yes, there was somebody else out there, but it wasn’t very relevant. It was your community. On the holidays, we would go stand outside the synagogue. That’s where we gathered, where we congregated. We weren’t in school; we were outside of the synagogue. On Hanukkah, we were throwing nuts against the wall. It was kind of a sport we had.

I guess reading Exodus [the novel by Leon Uris] really changed my — I think that was the factor that really made me understand being Jewish really mattered in some ways. It mattered in some good ways, and it mattered in some dangerous ways. It’s odd that that novel would really trigger my sense of being Jewish. We went to Israel the first time in ’72. We took a six-month sabbatical and went to Europe for six months. We went to Israel for a month and to England for three months and to Yugoslavia for two months. We had quite an amazing time. I was very affected by going to Israel.

I came back the next year in ’73 with the opening of the Ben Gurion University Medical School in Beersheva. Twelve of us, including Sy, gave lectures around the country. We gave about a dozen lectures around the country in honor of the opening of the medical school. I became involved in the health care system of Israel. I eventually joined their national health policy board and helped them create the national health insurance program when they turned the Histadrut [an Israeli labor organization] program into a national health insurance model in the mid-’80s. At least under the Labor government, I was very involved. I’m not very enthusiastic about the current government.

Fuchs: It’s a considerably different government.
GREENLICK: It’s a considerably different government, yes. So being involved in Israel also helped. I remember the sense of what it felt like being in Israel, which was maybe the first time that I felt like I was a Jew. This was ’72 by now. I just had a sense that I had come to somewhere where I would be accepted. The Portland community was a pretty fragile thing in the ’60s and ’70s, as I’m sure you know.

Fuchs: It was relatively small.
GREENLICK: It was relatively small and relatively diffuse. Even in the long-term community there was always this schism between the Russian Jews and the German Jews. It was a very odd community. Going to Israel the first time really cemented the sense in me that I was really Jewish and that it made a difference.

Fuchs: I want to come back to public policy with you. I’m curious about when it was you decided to run for legislature, what that experience was like early on, and how it’s evolved for you over the years.
GREENLICK: My first political experience was in 1944 when I was nine years old and stumbled across a storefront for the Franklin D. Roosevelt fourth campaign. I became interested in that and hung out and became a junior volunteer. I was interested in politics all along. When I was about 25, the congressman who represented me was Dingell, the father of the current Dingell, who was my congressman. He retired or died or something. I considered whether I wanted to run for Congress at that time. I had some labor people who were my neighbors who were interested in me running for congressman. So it was, was I going to run for Congress or am I going to go back and get my PhD? I decided to go back and get my PhD instead.

I came to Portland, and my first campaign was Neil Goldschmidt’s campaign for City Council in ’70. I got involved in his campaign, very much involved. He completely fascinated me. I was involved in the first group of ten fundraisers for Neil’s campaign, and then I had met Ron Wyden as the part of my Medicare research work. Ron was very helpful, and I got very involved in his first campaign. I was involved in Kitzhaber’s early campaigns. I was involved in all those campaigns a long time. I loved being involved in them, but it never occurred to me to run.

In 1998, there was a guy named Bill Witt who had run for Congress a couple of times and decided with five minutes before the deadline to step into a representative race against Chuck Carpenter, who was a liberal Republican. He was an openly gay Republican member of the Oregon legislature. He ran against him in the primary, ran a very homophobic campaign. It was just a terrible . . .

Fuchs: Witt was an ultra-conservative.
GREENLICK: An ultra-conservative. Then he ended up in ’98, because he beat Chuck by about 20 votes in the primary, being unopposed in my district for the election. So I decided I was going to run against him. In ’99 I started a campaign just completely out of the blue. I ran a very successful campaign in ’99 and 2000. It was a very Republican district, and I lost by about 400 votes. So I just kept running because I knew the districts were going to be redistricted because of the 2000 census. It was mostly a negative reaction, but by the time I had campaigned against him, I was the first one to raise $300,000 in a race. I really had fun running, so I decided I’d keep doing it.

Fuchs: What did you like about running?
GREENLICK: I liked the schmoozing, the talking to people. I loved the strategy and tactics. That’s basically what my life has always been about, strategy and tactics in one form or another. When you’re in a political campaign, you wake up in the morning — strategy and tactics, with clear outcomes. You set objectives, and you meet those objectives. It was kind of a fun game.

Fuchs: And how did you find the legislature when you first entered that world? What was your initial committee assignment? What was the experience like?
GREENLICK: My first few terms, I was in the minority. The Republicans had been controlling the legislature for 12 years when I came in. I wanted to be on the Health Committee, and they wouldn’t put me on the Health Committee, but I soon became involved in health in a very real way. It was a different world. I had been the department chair at OHSU for ten years in Public Health at that point. I lived in meritocracies where you were judged on the basis of what you did. In the research world, whether you got grants, whether you got papers published, whether you did research that mattered. In the academic world, it was very much the same way. It was a meritocracy, and you knew how to win the game.

When I got to the legislature, it was a kind of cold shock that everybody had the same number of votes I had. It didn’t matter whether you were as dumb as a rock, you still got one vote and I got one vote. It wasn’t about meritocracy. It was about getting 31 votes in the house, 16 votes in the senate, and the governor to sign your bill, and that’s what the game was. In the minority, that was a hard game. In my first three terms in the minority, I ended up passing 13 bills because I figured out strategy and tactics. I figured out who to get to sponsor my bills and things like that.

I became involved in the medical care side very early because the chair of the House Committee on Human Services, Jeff Kruse, who’s still a good friend of mine, a Republican senator now, invited me to sit in on a committee even though the speaker hadn’t named me to it. In 1988, that’s when I met John Kitzhaber for the first time, I’d been on the commission that invented the Oregon Health Plan. The Oregon Health Plan was in a crisis in 2003, so Jeff invited me to join with Ben Westlund and Alan Bates, worked to save the health plan. I became very much involved in that from the beginning.

Then when we took over the majority in the 2006 election, I became Chair of the Healthcare Committee, and I have been ever since. That was an interesting time for me. I had health challenges before then. In 2005 I was diagnosed with lymphoma, and I ended up having chemo and going into remission at that point. In December 2006, I fell leaving the Coliseum after a Blazers game and knocked the quadriceps off both my knees. We had just taken over a 31-29 majority, and I ended up coming to the opening ceremony in an ambulance, leaving Good Samaritan in an ambulance and being on a gurney voting to elect Jeff Merkley as speaker, because if I hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have been able to organize the House.

Fuchs: That’s amazing. You got to appear on the House floor on a gurney. That has to be a remarkable experience [laughter].
GREENLICK: It was very exciting. The gurney was only that day. Then I got out of the hospital on that following Thursday early because I had to be there to chair my committee, and I didn’t want to miss the first meeting of the Health Committee that I was chair of. The Capitol [staff], they were really great. They put a hospital bed in my office. They restructured a bathroom in the area so I could use an elevated bathroom seat. I was on the floor in a wheelchair for more than a month. We rented a two-bedroom suite at the Marriott Residence Inn and made one of the rooms a hospital room with a hospital bed and a commode and all the equipment I needed. For three months I had to come to the legislature in a wheelchair transport because both of my knees were in braces, and I couldn’t bend them so I couldn’t get into a car.

Fuchs: That must have been really powerful learning, to have that direct experience.
GREENLICK: It was amazing. I knew all the places in that building that were not ADA. We haven’t finished getting an ADA [inaudible word] yet. Yes, it was quite an experience. They were very accommodating.

Fuchs: Could you talk a little bit about the flow of the work that you’ve done at the legislative level around human services and healthcare issues?
GREENLICK: Underlying all of this was my attempt to get healthcare as a right into the Oregon Constitution. Harry and I ran an initiative campaign in the 2006 election trying to get it on the ballot. We collected 125,000 signatures and needed 145 to do it, so we didn’t get it in. I tried twice to get it in as a referral, in 2007 and 2009 — unsuccessfully, sabotaged in the Senate each time. My basic underlying interest is to make sure everybody in Oregon has access to healthcare. I’ve long since decided that this had to be an incremental model rather than changing instantly to a single-payer system. That’s not going to happen in Oregon. What I’ve done is try to chip away at it to try and expand the Oregon Health Plan. When I came into the legislature, the uninsured rate in Oregon was 17%. It’s under 5% now, and I’ve had a lot to do with bringing it down.

Somebody asked me what was the most memorable bill I passed. It was House Bill 2116 in the 2009 session. 2116 created a 1% tax on health insurance and made available health insurance for children. In a one-year period from the time we passed that, it got healthcare for 100,000 kids, just as a result of that one single bill and OHA’s taking on the responsibility. That’s been really important to me. I also in that same session passed HB 2009, which created the Oregon Health Authority. It moved all the health care stuff to a single place in the government so we could try and organize it. I helped create the Oregon Health Plan expansion and the Oregon Exchange, the health insurance exchange. We went from 650,000 in the Oregon Health Plan, as a result of Medicaid expansion under Obama, to 1.1 million in the Oregon Health Plan. We’re now down under 5% in the uninsured rate.

Fuchs: These are phenomenal achievements.
GREENLICK: And I really feel that I had a big piece of all those events.

Fuchs: I wonder if you might reflect on the experience of being a legislator in Oregon and compare it to experiences you may have had related to advocacy at the Federal level, or what you’ve seen in terms of the legislative branch’s process at the Federal level.
GREENLICK: When you’re dealing with politics in Oregon, it’s a retail game rather than a wholesale game, so you can affect it. It relates to having a close relationship to the governor, which — every one of the governors over the last 12 or 14 or years I’ve been on a first-name basis with. You can do that in Oregon. Kate Brown was with me when I was first elected. She was there that night at my house congratulating me. With every governor since Barbara Roberts, I’ve been on first-name terms. Barbara, Neil, John Kitzhaber. It’s a very different world when you can do that.

In the legislature, as I’ve said before, everything is 31, 16, and one. It’s all about how do you pass legislation and how do you get it implemented in a sensible way. That’s the way. It’s just feasible to do. As a committee chair, you have quite a bit of power in dealing with the agenda that you’re producing. You pretty much get to have an agenda that you pretty much run, particularly when you have a close relationship with the speaker as I had with Jeff Merkley, and Dave Hunt and Tina now. It’s a very personal game; it’s very different.

Fuchs: One thing that, at least from an outside perspective, seems to be true is that there is more of a bipartisan conversation in Oregon. I wonder if you find that to be the case.
GREENLICK: It’s absolutely the case. When we were in the minority, we managed to have it. When they were in the minority, they managed to have a lot of drama because when you’re in the minority you’re very frustrated and you play drama games. But the fact is, about 60% of all bills are passed almost unanimously. 60% of the bills that come through in one session have less than ten no votes. You work on it in committee; that’s where the work gets done. In my committee, I have five Democrats and four Republicans. Three of the four Republicans are very active workers with me to pass health care bills. We generally pass things out of committee unanimously.

Another 25% of the bills are split votes, like I passed one of my very first bills in my first session. It passed 32-28, and the 32 had 18 Republicans and 14 Democrats. It was split on policy grounds. It was about using a hundred million out of the retirement funds to help finance emerging Oregon industries. It was a policy dispute. It wasn’t a Democrat-Republican dispute. So it’s about 15% of the bills, roughly, come to real partisanship. And most of the time the outcome is well known, so the drama is just about creating drama and getting people on record voting wrong and doing all sorts of things like that. It’s not a real divide the way, let’s say, the US Congress has become, absolutely divided, at least the US House. I think the Senate still isn’t quite that bad, but the House is.

I think it’s because we’re a part-time legislature. Those guys in Washington get into a bubble. They’re pampered, and they’re in this bubble. They don’t have any real touch with reality. Our people go back to work. And when you go back to work, somebody’s going to say, what the hell are you guys doing down there? You’ve got to stop doing this and start doing that. There’s a real relationship. Our salary is $22,000 a year, so most people aren’t in it for the money; most people have a life somewhere else. We’re also smaller. Our House, which is the biggest body, has 60 members. US Congress has 435 members. I couldn’t even figure out who is on my committee if I were in US Congress. I have enough trouble remembering the 60. It’s a very different experience. And I think Oregon is different. I think they just have a different sense of how we’re supposed to be working here.

Fuchs: Let’s look forward for a few minutes before we conclude. I’m curious as to what your hopes are now as a policy leader in our state and also as a member of our Jewish community.
GREENLICK: I’m the oldest member of the legislature now, and I’ve announced that I plan on being the first person to have their 100th birthday in the legislature. So I have a limited horizon; I just have 19 more years to go to keep doing this stuff.

It’s interesting being a Jewish member of the legislature. It comes up only in some interesting contexts. The way that the legislature ran when I first came in, is they would call the roll, you would show up, and they would have an opening ceremony. The opening ceremony was a prayer more than half the time, and more than half of that time a very, very Christian prayer. I found that inappropriate, and I tried to fight against it, unsuccessfully. Finally, when Merkley took over as speaker, he didn’t want to fight it directly because he didn’t want to be seen as anti-religious to start his term. But what I managed to get them to do is to change the order of the session so that it started with the opening ceremony, then the courtesies, and then a roll call. My argument was that once the roll call came I was committed to being there; I had to be there. If the roll call came before the prayer, then I was forced to, in my mind, violate the order of the Constitution because I was not choosing that way to worship. I didn’t care whether it was a Jewish prayer or a Hindu prayer or whatever, I just thought prayer was inappropriate. So when they switched the order without anybody noticing that they had switched the order, basically I stopped coming in for the — the clerk’s office tells me when it’s going to be a prayer, and I don’t come in until after the prayer is over. There are a few of us who essentially gather outside waiting for the prayer to end. It’s a little different.

Feeling Jewish has made a difference in some ways, but basically it doesn’t make a big difference. Basically, there are those of us that have the same kind of social policy perspective I have; some of them are Jewish, and most of them aren’t. There’s an interesting organization called the Oregon Center for Christian Values, or something like that. The first time they asked to come and see me, I assumed they were one of these right-wing, evangelistic groups. It turns out they weren’t. It turns out that they’re a group of Christians who believe Christians should behave like Christians and should be charitable and follow the same social policy values that I always say come from the Judeo-Christian ethic. It’s the tzedakah principle that they accept. Values become important, and values sometimes come out of the religious context but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come from a secular perspective.

My hope is to stay as long as my health and Harriet’s health stays. I don’t have very complicated election campaigns anymore. I’m pretty much a fixture. The last time I ran, I was nominated by the Democrats and the Republicans. This time I am nominated by the Democrats and the Independent Party. It’s not a big problem running for office. As long as my health holds up, we have work to do. We still have 5% uninsured. We have to get kids whose parents are undocumented into healthcare. We’re going to do that this session. We’re going to get those 75,000 kids. I have a lot of work to do yet. I have to get drug prices under some semblance of control.

Fuchs: Representative, it was a real pleasure to have a chance to chat with you this way. Thank you for doing it.
GREENLICK: I was delighted.